Hi,

Planning to take a flight from CCU-DEL-ZRH, the DEL-ZRH being on Swiss Air with Air India code share. The tickets have been issued by Air India, wanted to confirm if I would do the immigration at CCU or at DEL. This is the first time I would be taking a code share flight with AI and am a little skeptical of the ground staff at CCU airport (have had a lot of bad experiences with them.)

Also the connection time according to current itinerary give more than 2 hours of connection so I should be ok there, however if I need to pick my bags and re-check in would that be cutting it to close.

They will check thru your luggage to ZRH without issues, but depending on whether the AI flight is a intl or domestic, you need to do immigration in DEL. So if you are on AI023, you can do immigration in CCU as its an international flight. In any case, if you have to do immigration in DEL its painless, just takes 15 mins extra if you have no luggage to run after.

I'm on the same AI023 situation in late June (but on separate tickets) and will report.

The biggest concern is getting the luggage onto the flight from Delhi to Zurich if it is supposed to be done automatically.

2-3 years back we traveled from Kolkata to Paris via Delhi on Air India. Experiencing the situation then, I would suggest that you fly 2-3 hours earlier, collect your luggage and then re checkin and pass immigration in Delhi.

a lot has changed in the last 2-3 years....i don't expect this to be a problem anymore....

About a year ago I had the opportunity to peek over the shoulder of the AI checkin desk agent in CCU as he worked on my booking. They are well integrated with *A carriers and can pick and choose what to do in their interface. My booking was CCU-AI-BOM-LH-MUC on AI codeshare and since the first segment was badly late he deselected the check thru and was shown a myriad of options as a next step. My guess is the OPs luggage will defintely be checked thru, but they will purposely not check him in for the LX flight and he may have to report to LX on arrival to get the next BP and then clear immigration and security again. That said DEL is a very decent airport to navigate.

Thanks for the info.. I guess even if the luggage would be through checked in it should be a comfortable transfer in Delhi, my experience with the Kolkata ground staff has been extremely disappointing on many occasions. Would be traveling next week so would update on how things went at the airport once I am back.

Took my flight yesterday, first the check in agent told me that I was to immigrate in Kolkata with through luggage check in till ZRH but she cannot printout the boarding passes of the Del Zrh sectors. I needed to get the same from transfer terminal in DEL. She could not assign us seats so that we could sit together also.

I then requested her to treat us domestic passengers as I was expecting some people at Delhi airport and she tagged our luggage through and gave me the D boarding passes showing which we went out at DEL met my folks at the arrival terminal, got on the escalator, got back up to departures and then proceeded to check in at Swiss. Fairly hassle free, although I believe using the transfer facility at Delhi would have been a breeze.

On a side note Swiss could not add my AI FFP number on while boarding, so I guess would need to send in the passes once I am back.

Had a similar situation last Sunday: booked on AI23 dep 20:15 arr 22.30 and on a separate ticket LH763 dep 00:45.

AI23 was delayed 90mins as was the earlier AI701, so I headed to the airport and asked what I could do. They did offer to check thru the luggage on LH and give me an intl BP so I could just change gates in DEL. But then upon some maths the connection did seem too tight, so they (supervisior checkin in G (intl AI)) just sent me over to the E desk supervisor (domestic AI) with an employee to explain the situation and I got rebooked on the earlier domestic flight without any issues.

AI ground staff in CCU was pretty OK, talked to the supervisor directly explaining what I wanted and they seemed open to all ideas. Even though they spoke Bengali amongst each other, they always reverted to English when I spoke Bengali to them.