Purpose of Check-in
 

There may be discussion on this already, but I didn't find it after some searching, so I'll start my own thread.

I'm starting to wonder whether there is really any point to the process we call "checking in" these days. In the old days, it seemed to me this was the point at which I presented one piece of paper (called a "ticket", with "flight coupons") and received another piece of paper (called a "boarding pass"), and simultaneously gave the airline some indication that I was actually in the airport, and with high probability would actually get on the plane.

Now we have on-line check-in, which I can do from anywhere; so just because I am "checked in", the airline should not have too much confidence that I'm actually in the airport, rather than asleep, in a pub, changing a tyre on the expressway, etc. Since the advent of on-line check-in, have the airlines experienced significantly more people who are "checked in" but who do not board the flight?

And now, when I checked in for my flight at LHR at a kiosk, I received some message that I would automatically be checked in for my return flight, and the boarding pass mailed to me.

So if I understand this correctly, I can receive my boarding pass by email, print it out, check no baggage, get through security, and the first time the airline will have any indication at all that I'm actually at the airport and planning to be on the flight will be at boarding. Before that time, they wouldn't know if I changed my plans, accidentally went to the wrong airport, got a flat tyre, or died two weeks before.

If that's the case, I'm starting to wonder why we "check in" at all. Why not just have everyone automatically checked in for all flights? Legal reasons? Operational reasons? Some other reasons? Boarding passes can be sent by email and printed out, and checking in no longer indicates physical presence at the airport and readiness to begin the trip, so is there really any point to it at all?

Just wondering ...

Checking passenger regarding valid visa for required passport? What happens when the passenger doesn't have a valid visa and (s)he is sent back? I'm pretty sure neither the passenger nor the (refusing) arrival country will pay his/her way back.

Agreed entirely, and doubly so in the era where non-refundable tickets are predominant. As I understand it, refundable tickets used to become non-refundable on check in, so that was a purpose- to close in on the final tally. But I can't see any other real purpose, than seat allocation.

Conversely, I nearly always travel internationally and with checked bags. Upgrades don't happen. So I've never seen the point of OLCI when, at the airport I have to wait in the same line and spend the same amount of time with the same agent. So I don't bother.

So then under this automatic check-in for the return that I seem to have gotten here, would they be checking for visa validity in both directions on the outbound?

I wasn't paying enough attention - I think I just entered passport information into the kiosk on the outbound, without anyone actually checking it. But maybe they did check.

Not quite on topic, but I found this rather funny - I have two passports, and and flew from the US to China on UA a while back. I gave one passport to the check-in agent (because it was my authority to be in the US), but the Chinese visa was in the other passport. I was fully expecting to be asked where my Chinese visa was, but the presence of a years-old used and expired Chinese visa in the passport I gave seemed to be good enough :)

That sort of task seems to be beyond the capabilities of OLCI so it's done at the check in counter (at least IME with UA, AC, LX, BA, VS and all the other airlines I've flown in the last ten years.

The return on my trip is US to UK, and they are claiming I will be check-in automatically. Maybe my automatic check in will "bounce".

First of all, you cannot check in online to an international destination (at the beginning of a trip). When you try to do this, you will not get a BP. Instead, you will get this rather useless document:

"THIS IS NOT A BOARDING PASS. You will need to complete your check-in at an airport kiosk."

At the airport, you have to scan your passport at a kiosk to get a BP. If a visa is required, you will need to go to the check-in counter to see a live person OR your documentation will be checked at the gate before you board.

The reason you can be checked in automatically on your return flight is because your documentation has already been checked. And you probably need to return to your own country!

For domestic flights, you can check in online. That at least gives the airline some comfort that you have indicated within 24 hours of your flight that you intend to board that flight. Of course, there are always some passengers who don't make the flight, but the airline knows it's a very small number that check in and don't board. So the procedure works and it limits the lines at the check-in counter, saving the airline money. Does that make sense?

Check-in serves a multitude of purposes:

1. With OLCI there is generally a cutoff a # of hours prior to departure. Those who don't OLCI by the cutoff and then miss the counter deadline, mean there's a free seat the carrier can sell or use to reduce overbooking.

2. Doc. check on intl. flights. The earlier problems are caught the better for both the carrier and the pax. Remember, if a carrier flies a pax to another country and the pax is denied entry, the carrier gets fined and is responsible for all costs associated with returning the pax to origin point.

3. Bag check, even if it's a nominally separate physical location from people who simply need a BP.

4. Problem children. There are all kinds of pax who have screwed up situations. Whether those are the carrier's fault or the pax, they need to get unscrewed up.

That said, there is certainly a lesser need for check-in and that's why there are far fewer physical counters and employees than in the old days when issuing a BP meant handwriting a card and affixing a seat assignment sticker.

On the negative side, because carriers no longer know who is actually at the gate, they are tougher on deadlines.

The airline has to pay to transport the person back. In theory, this should NEVER happen unless the passenger has a forged passport or visa, because the airline isn't going to let you get on the flight without checking your documents. Also, the passenger more than likely has a R/T ticket so he has already "paid" his way back.

I also don´t OLCI for intercontinental flights when I have to check bags and I can use priority check-in. There´s no point.

On the contrary, since I scanned my passport for my first post 3/3 international trip I can and have printed out boarding passes for subsequent international trips and, with no checked bags, been able to proceed directly to the boarding line at the gate for travel to countries without a visa requirement, e.g. EU, Hong Kong. Passport and boarding pass checked at boarding.

per the contract of carriage

Subject to applicable laws and regulations, the Passenger must pay the applicable fare whenever UA, on government order, is required to return a Passenger to his/her point of origin or elsewhere due to the Passenger‘s inadmissibility into/or deportation from a country. The fare will be the applicable fare in effect at the time of the original Ticket‘s issuance. Any difference between the applicable fare and the fare paid will be collected from or refunded to the Passenger, as the case may be. UA will apply to the payment of such fares any funds paid by the Passenger for unused carriage or any funds of the Passenger in possession of UA. The fare collected for carriage to the point of refusal of entry or deportation will not be refunded by UA unless the law of such country requires that the fare be refunded.

As to the purpose of checkin, it really doesn't do much, and it didn't do much before. Until you board the plane, you could always leave, and they would not know. Even if you were in the days of paper tickets and handing them over at the counter.

It gets you on lists, and shows your intent to fly. If you don't check in they will at some point believe you are not flying, but if you do they will think you are still flying. You can for example checkin now for a flight tomorrow and show up at the gate sixteen minutes before the flight and expect to still get on. If you don't check in and just show up a half hour before the flight at the airport, they may have given up your seat because you missed the 45 minute cut off.

It also can significantly cut down the time you spend in line at the airport if there's a huge line to check in.

Since this is not specifically about United, please follow it in TravelBuzz!

l'etoile
UA moderator

As part of a carrier obtaining landing rights in a foreign country, it must agree to repatriate any pax who is denied entry into that country. The carrier is also responsible for substantial fines as well as reimbursement for security costs for the pax. Some countries have been known to physically hold the aircraft until the pax is back onboard.

According to the COC of every carrier I've seen, all of these costs are then subject to recoupement from the pax. Cost of fine, security and one-way full Y fare can be enormous. Needless to say, if the pax has a CC with sufficient credit limit, the carrier will see its money, otherwise it's expensive and like trying to get blood from a stone.

I completely agree with the OP. Especially with auto-check in nonsense for the return flight. If I'm not in and out the same day, who can know what will happen before the return flight. And now that there is no option on the website to cancel check in, it becomes a pain - a couple of weeks ago, it took 3 calls to web support and an hour and a half of my time to cancel my check in for a flight I couldn't take. With PMUA, you could do this easily online. If you need to ake changes, etc. on the phone, I have always been under the impression you can't be checked in.

Saying this should "never" happen is an overstatement - a valid passport and visa does not guarantee entry to a country. For example, some countries will deny entry with a valid passport if it is not valid beyond X (typically 6) months (though I suppose UA should know this beforehand). Most countries that I have seen stipulate that a valid visa does not guarantee entry to a country. A passenger can have the wrong type of visa, be carrying equipment that the arrival country won't allow in, etc.

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Right you are. Fines definitely occur against the carrier. I often wonder how much "really" (??) is recouped from the passenger as far as the price of a return ticket (they don't pay the fine). Frankly, I think the airlines just eat it. Most of it could be obviated by careful Timatic entries by the customer service agents at check-in. There has to be a better way because airlines are still being fined for these mistakes - we're talking millions over a period of six months to a year and apparently, things slip through (i.e., wrong information entered).

In most cases, there's nothing to recoup. The contract is worded so that the cost is the cost at the time of the ticket purchase. See the quote above from United's contract. If you are traveling on a round trip ticket, that just means they take the return portion of your ticket and call it even. I would assume the majority of those who get caught in this have a return ticket.

In the case of United, as clearly outlined in the terms, it's not the full fare same day walk up ticket price.

If you have to interline your checked baggage, you have to check in with an agent.

On a recent trip to LCA from JFK, I had two separate tickets (DL: JFK - ATH and Cyprus Airways: ATH-LCA) and had the agent in JFK interline my checked bags. Cannot do this with OLCI.

The offending pax is still liable to the carrier for damages. Just the same as if the pax had cut a hole in a seat or somesuch. And, carriers do go after pax for the full monty. In addition, if, as an example, one had a ticket IAD-NRT-PEK and were denied at NRT, the pax would be returned to IAD (origination), not sent on to PEK.

Can't you?

That's never been my experience. I've always been issued a boarding pass for my international flights, and have been able to go straight to the gate unless I was checking baggage. Document checks are done at the gate.

Or were you specifically talking about international flights originating in the USA?

True, true. A valid visa is almost never an absolute guarantee of entry. Neither is a valid passport if a visa is not required. However, if a passenger has valid documentation for travel but is denied entry to the country of destination for other reasons (e.g. passenger has insufficient funds, passenger's story doesn't "add up" when questioned, etc, etc), I don't believe that the airline would be fined. Insufficient validity period remaining on the passport would be different, because in that case the passenger's documentation is not adequate, which should be picked up by the airline before the passenger is allowed to travel.

It happened recently to Jetstar in New Zealand, although the circumstances were more complex than just not having a valid visa - someone apparently changed the nationality of the pax from Chinese (CN) to Swiss (CH) on the paperwork.

DCBob brings up an interesting point about forged documents. Who should be liable if the passenger has forged documents? Would they just be deported, or would they be charged with a criminal offence?

to get out of usa, i seem to be required to present my valid passport to the agent in person.(wife cannot do it).

is a waste of time to attempt to checkin on line(any form of on line)

You can check in on line for an international flight. I do it frequently, flying both from the US and from other countries.

Yes, you do still have to go to a check-in counter and see an airline agent (and deposit your luggage and have it tagged) but there is usually a much shorter line for those who have done OLCI than for those who have not.

Therefore, it saves time at the airport. Even if only for that reason, I prefer OLCI.

Balderdash - utterly, totally and completely.

I fly regularly with BA ex London airports to destinations in Europe, north America and Africa, and I have always checked in on line and printed the requisite boarding cards.

If I am travelling to a non-European destination I show my passport at the BA visa check desk and then hey presto! I am on my way to security etc etc.

Who pays?
 

As a follow-on to the posts discussing (theoretically) who pays to repatriate a passenger denied entry because of incorrect documentation:

We were booked from BKK to SGN. We have NZ passports and, at that time, we had to have a visa to enter Vietnam.

We got our visas about 3 weeks before departure and checked in at BKK. The agent at the Thai Airways counter checked our visa at check-in.

When we arrived in SGN, we were denied entry to Vietnam and, after much shouting by Vietnamese officials, at us and at the TG staff, Thai Airways was required to fly us back to BKK.

When we arrived back in BKK, we were informed that, due to a Pan-Asian conference in Hanoi the weekend we traveled, Vietnam had declared our class of visa invalid. Previously, they had been phasing out our class of visa and phasing in the new class but, due to this conference, they had arbitrarily declared our class of visa to be invalid.

Apparently, Thai Airways had been notified only the day before our travel that they should not let anyone with our class of visa onto their flights to Vietnam, but this information had apparently not filtered down to their check-in agents.

We found Thai Airways' HQ in Bangkok and were issued with new tickets, BKK-SGN and SGN-BKK, at no cost to ourselves.

I do not know if Thai were fined, but I do know that they had to bear the cost of our additional flights and that they made no attempt to recover anything from us.

easyJet in the UK has effectively got rid of check-in - you can print your boarding passes a couple of months before the flight. Presumably this "deadline" is there in case of schedule changes.

Neil

Check in agents are typically only familiar with their own country's passport / visa requirements for the destination (ie an agent in the US knows the rules for US passport holders etc) so you do get instances where they fly people without visas especially if the 'home' country doesn't require them. I've had the opposite, where I have been traveling on an 'other' passport and had to point out I had no need for the visa their 'home' passport holders needed.

I'm able to check in for international flights online with no issue - and have done so for a number of years.

Are you not able to check in online, select sears etc, then ask at the baggage drop off for your bags to be interlined? I've not had an issue having my bags tagged to my final destination at the bag drop desk, having done 2 sets of online check in, but it may have been because they were both * Alliance?

Hmm. Haven't tried it. I suspose it is possible. But since I have to deal with an agent to interline the bags, I didn't bother with OLCI.

My response was to the origination of this thread in the UNITED forum. I was referring specifically to United flights from the USA. In the past you could OLCI to international destinations from the USA, but not any longer. The document I referred to is one I actually received from United when doing OLCI last week. On the return flight, I was checked in automatically and received a BP online.

Perhaps the United computers now have my passport information and will allow OLCI on future international flights. We will see.

The moderator MOVED this thread from the United Forum to TravelBuzz! Hence, there is some confusion here. I was responding to UNITED flights from the USA to international destinations. So my post had nothing to do with BA flights ex London.

Not necessarily. The nationality/citizenship of the passenger would be taken into account here. A Chinese national who was not otherwise admissable to the United States (eg. a tourist who had already used his single entry visa to the USA) and who expressed no credible fear of persecution if returned to China would be removed from Japan to China rather than to the USA.

There are plenty of other scenarios where passengers can be removed to countries other than those of their flight origin and indeed in some cases, even countries other than their country of origin, destination, citizenship or residence.

Stories of check-in agents making errors or not being congisant of entry requirements are legion. Often they are ignorant or make assumptions by extrapolating from one set of circumstances that they know and assuming that similar circumstances apply in all cases. (For example, it is – or was – not uncommon for passengers with an EU passport to be denied boarding, or to have to go well up the "food chain" of the airline staff to achieve boarding – if their trip apparently ended in another EU country not their own. Citizens of EU countries are permitted entry to other EU countries with no need for an onward or return ticket, so there is no problem if, for example, the trip of a British citizen passport holder ends in France.)

Some countries have slightly complicated visa regimens/visa exemptions that are not based entirely on citizenship of the traveller alone.

The wording of British immigration stamps, visas and certificates has been known to cause particular confusion – the wording is often complicated, owing partly to the complicated nature of British nationality and immigration legislation – and though the wording has been simplified in many cases, confusion can still arise, especially with airline staff whose English is not good (e.g. "leave to enter" is a particularly difficult one, since to a person with limited English, the word "leave" is likely to mean the opposite of "enter"...).

It is to be hoped that such problems are becoming less common, though it is always worth the passenger knowing what the requirements actually are.

Neither UA nor the USA are the navel of the planet. There is an entire world out there many Americans never consider.

Don't airlines offer their check-in staff the most elementary of training any more?

While I was a student in the early 70s I worked part time as a check-in agent. Before I was even permitted to look at a single passenger I underwent two solid weeks of training including a basic knowledge of passports and visas.

In those far-off says, the TIM [Travel Information Manual]was next to the Holy Bible in importance. Is it not reasonable to expect (or even to suspect) that similar information is readily available on check-in agents' desk terminals?

I'm sure that they do offer training to their check-in staff, although even so there's no accounting for how dim-witted some people can be! Also, many of these check-in "mistakes" have happened with low-cost, no-frills or charter airlines, some of which are quite small and which probably don't offer such comprehensive training (or as much ongoing training) as the larger, full-service carriers.

You mean, like Idaho or Nebraska?

;):D
They do have this kind of information; even KVS has it. Some issues though:
- Some TAs are subcontracted and training on this particular issue doesn't seem to be a priority. (I've encountered all sorts of stupid questions/remarks regarding visas.)
- Some TAs know little to no geography. I think the worst is in the US, where they some may have heard of Canada or France, but ask them to name a country beyond that and they are clueless. Airlines want cheap resources... and they get what they pay for.

I can totally see the check-in being pointless nowadays in most scenarios. When flying domestic, or within Schengen or whatnot, since there is really no border crossing, you can select your seat in advance and if you have no bags... what is the point, really?

How does that all work when you fly through an intermediate country that you can get in to, but you're flying one way so there's no return trip that you paid for that they'll use as your flight back. Let's say I fly JFK-FRA-BOM on Lufthansa with a US passport on a one way ticket. India won't let me in because I don't have valid documentation and the checkin agent at JFK didn't bother to verify it. But as a US citizen, I can get into Germany with no problem. Is it LH's responsibility to get be back to JFK or can they only send me back to FRA and tell me I'm on my own?