Alaska error with chinese visa requirements
 

My boyfried just spent about 30 hours on a plane, 12 hours in detention, and lost a lot of money and miles spent on travel arrangements due to an error by alaska airlines mileage booking desk. When he purchased his ticket to beijing china (to be the best man in a wedding) they told him beijing had the visa upon arrival setup and he did not need a visa ahead of time.


When he checked in for his flight they did not ask to see his visa. When he landed the airline finally discovered their mistake.

They detained him for 12 hours then sent him to tokyo and instead of finding him alternate routes to his destination via hong kong (which offers visa on arrival) they sent him home.


The airline is refusing to help get him to the wedding or cover his lost costs...his credit card travel insurance is also refusing to cover this.

Looking for recommendations on what to do to get the airline to cover last minute trip back or at least cover the costs he incurred because of this...


Thanks

Your boyfriend learned an (expensive) lesson: never trust airline staff when they inform you about visa requirements. A quick google-search would have told your boyfriend that he needs a visa.

In the future, use this link for visa information.

If you are not suppose to trust the staff...maybe they should not tell you the visa info. I know with cpas and in real-estate you are not suppose to advise clients on areas outside your expertise.....if you do there are pretty stiff penalties.

Btw...confirmation number for his ticket was <personal data removed by moderator>. I am hoping someone from alaska (who this was booked through and who provided the incorrect info) or delta (who operated the flight) will message me about how to get this resolved. Otherwise i will try calling their help desk.

If the wedding is in Beijing then going to Hong Kong wouldn't be much better than Tokyo. You still need a visa for China to get from Hong Kong SAR into mainland China. There are some visa expediters in HK that may have been able to help, depending on how much time your boyfriend had, otherwise he could go to the Chinese embassy in Tokyo.

Another option is to make use of the 24 transit visa on arrival in Beijing, which would at least allow him to make the wedding, even though he'd have to get back on a plane soon thereafter.

The airline could offer some assistance as a gesture of goodwill, but ultimately everyone is going to point the finger back at your boyfriend.

When is the wedding?

Welcome to Flyertalk.

While it's not acceptable what happened to him, it's also not uncommon for the airline people to not have a clue what they are talking about when they are giving out visa information.

Like Sjoerd said, you need to verify anything they tell you.

Don't rely on somebody here seeing the post and messaging you from the airlines.

Sorry to say it but the airline will not compensate, nor should they.

It is always the responsibilty of the passenger to ensure he or she is in compliance with all requirements such as visa's--in other words to have the proper travel documents. A "he-said, she-said" type of scenario will not alter that...remember the old maxim, "Ignorance of the Law is no excuse".

The airline has to enforce these rules to be in compliance with whatever requirements the destination country happens to have.

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Thanks for the reply. Wedding is thurs and it is a 6 hr train ride to the location. It sounds like at this point there is no way to get him there in time

There are some visa expediters in HK that may have been able to help, depending on how much time your boyfriend had, otherwise he could go to the Chinese embassy in Tokyo.

First things first. Welcome to FT!

You probably should check out the other similar thread, but I doubt your boyfriend will be as lucky as the other OP:

Advise on airline refund

The airline staff can even tell you the weather of your destination. Can they guarantee you with 100% accuracy of their forecast? If the weather is not what they say it will be, what will you do? Call the help desk as well?

FWIW, Alaska Airlines is NOT Chinese Embassy nor any part of Chinese government (or any other country). Why would anyone, you and your boyfriend included, take the airline's words for it on visa requirement? :confused:

I understand not everybody is a seasoned traveler. When I visit foreign countries, I may fly different airlines, depending on my routes and preference of FFPs. However, I always google and check with the destination countries and find out their visa and/or requirements for travel documents. I know that's my responsibilities and nobody else's. Not to mention I don't want to learn any expensive lessons from my own mistakes or ignorance, if any of my travel documents goes wrong.

Sorry about what happened to your boyfriend but he is the one to blame. He is not entitled to any compensation from any airline. If he did, go buy another lottery ticket. ;)

Assuming he's a USA citizen, he can do the transit without visa at PEK for IIRC 48 hours en route to a third country, not on the way back to USA. In the past, Hong Kong was where one could get a fast visa for mainland China and I assume this is still true. Hong Kong does not require a visa, even upon arrival.

I think OP said he is back in the US now - so getting the visa can be done in a day, but physical travel time is now too tight (ie won't get on this afternoon's flights to China).

I'm sorry to hear about the situation. As others have already said, the first rule of international travel is "It's the traveler's responsibility to have all necessary travel documents for their destination." It's fundamental. The sooner you accept this and move on, the better it will be for you. I'd recommend you give up any notion of getting "compensation" from either Alaska or Delta. At best, they *may* be able to get an award seat released when it otherwise would not be available, but they probably consider the tickets used for flights flown as having been used, since they did actually fly the passenger.

You do have a good question: "If you can't rely on the airline's answer, why do they give one at all?" Alaska probably shouldn't be giving visa answers to any destination that they don't actually fly. But there once again is some passenger responsibility here: Consider that you can book travel through partners to just about any country in the world via Alaska. Do you expect the Alaska awards desk to have authoritative answers to the visa requirements of every country in the world? I don't it's reasonable to expect that they would.

Delta, on the other hand is a different story. Since they actually fly to China, they have a responsibility to China (but not to the passenger) to know and enforce the visa rules, at least to the first approximation. They should never have boarded a passenger with such an obvious defect of not having a required visa in their passport. With many countries, carriers that make such a mistake can face stiff fines (like on the order of US$10,000) for each occurrence, and the front-line employee that checked the passenger in with a missing visa could lose their job over the situation. I'm somewhat surprised to hear that Delta made such a mistake, and I'd guess it's pretty rare. Having said that, their responsibility is to China and not to the passenger in this situation. Also, Delta provides a tool on their website that will display Visa requirements for any destination and nationality. Had that been used by the passenger, they would have seen the "visa required" situation.

As to why Delta flew the passenger from Beijing to Tokyo and not to Hong Kong, it almost certainly has to do with the fact that Delta flies between Beijing and Tokyo but not between Beijing and Hong Kong. The passenger and the gate agent that checked them in have already created quite the situation by not having the proper travel document. Do you further expect them to pay to transport the passenger on another carrier to Hong Kong because it would be more convenient for the passenger? Also, as someone else pointed out, although it's true that Hong Kong doesn't have a visa requirement for US citizens, that would be of little help, as you have to cross an international border to get from Hong Kong to mainland China.

BTW, welcome to FlyerTalk! We are actually a welcoming community, but sometimes new users are taken aback when they join to share a bad situation that happened and are surprised that everyone doesn't take their side against the "big, bad airline that wronged them." The collective wisdom here is that this is not always the case.

Terrible situation OP but unfortunately, he has no legal recourse. Airlines are not travel agents nor do they represent the state department. Visa requirements can be tricky and may or may not apply depending on the travellers nationality and the destination. For this reason, the airline can't keep a comprehensive list of all possible scenarios to ensure that each traveller has the appropriate documentation. Not to mention that, especially when travelling to China, it may take a month or more to get the appropriate visa from the Chinese embassy prior to the trip. In the past when travelling to China, I've often sent my passport off for the visa before I bought my plane ticket. This is no different than airline ensuring that a traveller doesn't have some variety of criminal status or disease history (some countries will not allow you in, or scrutizine your entry if you are HIV postive, for example)

As others have noted, the airline owes him nothing. They are simply a vehicle for providing transit from point A to point B. It is ultimately up to the traveller to ensure they meet all of the entry requirements for a country.

Hope a suitable solution may be found in the very limited time he has to make it to the wedding! Welcome to FT!