Stranded by multi city ticket
 

I have a ticket 'MSP-LAX LAX-AMS AMS-LAX LAX-MSP' right now I am in LA without a passport. There is not enough time to acquire a new passport before my flight. I'm OK with not going to Amsterdam but I do want to make it back to Minneapolis and I don't think I should have to pay to do it. Any ideas?

Do you think someone else should pay to get you back to MSP?

I think he's just trying to be able to skip unflown segments of his original itinerary. Even if he loses the value of LAX-AMS-LAX, he still wants to be able to use the final segment: LAX-MSP.

Welcome to FT!

Did you forget your passport at home? Lose it? Never get one in the first place?

I would think that you might be able to persuade NW to delay the continuation of your trip without penalty if you have a good excuse for not having your passport. If it's at home, for example, perhaps someone could FedEx it to you and you could start your transatlantic journey tomorrow.

There has to be more to this. You must have nested, as I don't believe NW will let you get on the first segment of an itinerary, that includes an international segment, without a DA verification.

Is LAX-AMS going through MEM/DTW/MSP, or is that a KLM direct?

Steve B.

No, there is no time to have the passport shipped or have a new one issued. It is at home in a safe an no one there has the keys.

No, there is nothing more, NW does let you on a flight without a passport if the first flight is domestic. I wish they didn't then I wouldn't be where I am now.

the Amsterdam flights are direct to and from LA.

Well, you're not stranded by a multi-city ticket, but by forgetting your passport. You can often get a same day passport, if you have your other details (birth certificate, etc). You can call the airline and explain your situation. And hope for some help. Otherwise, it's your fault, and you'll suffer, I'm sure. ;)

Surprised that you didn't put passport in your pocket and check it before you left home.

Maybe you can persuade the LAX ticket counter to accept the LAX-MSP
portion of your ticket without charge to get you back to MSP but usually
a charge for changes. Hopefully you can get back to MSP and get credit
for unused segments toward purchase of new ticket.

Since MSP appears to be home, if I were you, I'd try to persuade NW to let me substitute LAX-MSP-AMS for the LAX-AMS nonstop so I could swing by the house during a layover at MSP and pick up the passport.

In my experience, this is not true. Your boarding pass should have beeped when it was scanned at MSP, and the agent should have been alerted that your international documents (eg passport) had not been verified. I have seen this happen, and have personally been called up to the gate for my first (domestic) flight because this information was not in place in the computer system. Once the info is checked, they stamp "D/A OK" on your boarding pass, to verify that they have the information, and that you have your passport.

If this was all one itinerary (no matter which mode of nwa.com you used to book it), and that didn't happen, then someone messed up big time.

Sounds like the LAX-AMS was a seperat itin nested in MSP-LAX in which case there would be no way to tie the MSP_LAX seg to the international one.

Yes, that's what Steve suggested too, but that was denied by the OP. If they're all in the same itinerary, the system would have known. So, if the OP is correct in that they were not nested itineraries, and he is in LA, then someone at MSP messed up.

Just this past summer, I used multi-city to book:
MSN-PDX, PDX-TLS, TLS-PDX, PDX-MSN. The system knew that I was going to France, and knew that I needed to have a passport. And it knew this in Madison (this was the instance I was referring to, where I was called up to the gate).

OP, was there a stopover booked in LA? Or was it just a straight away connection?

As I've heard, there's a significant financial penalty against the airlines by foreign governments if a pax is delivered without proper docs (and has to be returned home), hence the efficiency at not letting someone on an international segment without a D/A. If this were a single itinerary, single-PNR, MSP-LAX-AMS-LAX-MSP, and there was no D/A at MSP-LAX, it appears to be a breakdown in process by NW in MSP.

Appears LAX-AMS-LAX is the KL601/KL602 turn (and 747!). Could the international segment of a PNR being on a codeshare have prevented the D/A requirement at initial departure?

Steve B.

Yes I got into LA on Monday and am supposed to leave tomorrow for Amsterdam. So yes there is a stop in LA which is why they didn't ask for a passport in Minneapolis (I assume). I just bought a one way back to Minneapolis so this is moot now.

I think you gave up too easily. For the price of that last-minute one-way ticket, you should have been able to re-route through MSP and grab your passport.