Let's say I'm flying from A to B to C, all on the same airline and same ticket. I have a layover in B of 1 hours 44 minutes.

I would like to spend the night in B and then fly to C the next morning. Normally 1 hours 44 minutes is plenty of time for a domestic connection without a terminal change, but what if I took my nice sweet time at the airport and "missed" my connecting flight? Will the airline be obligated to put me on a flight the next morning (my flight is the last one of the day) or will they say that 1 hours 44 minutes should have been more than enough time and it's my fault for missing it?

They'll likely put you on standby.

Also: count my vote for a dumb idea.

Just to make your story sound good, demand that he airline pay for your hotel for the night.

Various possible options including the following:

1. confirmed for free on another flight on the same airline;
2. placed on a wait/standby-list for free;
3. required to pay a fee and/or fare adjustment to get confirmed for another flight or to get placed on a wait/standby-list.

For example, I missed a connecting flight at AMS by less two minutes (originally scheduled transit time was 60 minutes) and got sent to the transit desk to get my situation fixed. KL's idea of fixing my situation? Telling me to buy a new ticket if I wanted to fly out of AMS. Being a Skyteam Elite Plus customer a couple times over did me no favors either.

And certainly make sure that the B flight does not arrive two gates from the C flight....

Assuming the airline could see what time your 1st flight arrived and that you had plenty of time, I'd be surprised if they reaccomodated you for free. Now you're taking up two seats (the one that went empty and the one you'll be sitting in that next morning), assuming no one was on standby for the seat on the flight you 'missed'.

Frankly it wouldn't surprise me if you had a reasonable amount of time if the airline cancelled the rest of your itinerary as a no-show.

Not only that, if flight A-B arrives earlier than scheduled (especially possible on long-haul), and/or B-C is delayed (not for you, but by weather, MX) , that "close but not enough" gap of 1 hour 44 min could easily become 2.5+ hours. Much harder to explain...
I don't know the inner workings of airlines but I agree. The only acceptable excuse I can even imagine would be a physical limitation on how fast you can walk, but even then the airline would claim that you should have asked for wheelchair assistance and/or allowed a longer layover. (And I would never encourage anyone to fake a disability to get away with this.)

I'm adding my vote to UnitedFlyGuy's: this is a dumb idea.

I would suspect it depends on the MCT ?!


+1

Thanks for all the responses. Does anyone know what the maximum connection time would be for the airline to be willing to reaccommodate you? Are there rules on this, or is it up to the discretion of the staff to decide whether you "should" have been able to make the connection?

I did toy with doing this once. The travel department where I worked were kicking up a fuss about me flying LHR-xxx direct while I was on 100% travel there, as they got kickbacks from KLM, and so wanted me to fly LHR-AMS-xxx, despite the fact that this now meant a 6am flight on a Monday, returning at 8pm on a Friday (and I live about 2h from LHR).

On the outbound, there was a 40-minute connection (non-Schengen to Schengen), so the possibility for misconnections was definitely there, and my inbound from LHR was 10 minutes late arriving. I could so easily have been "delayed" going through immigration etc and turned up several hours late to make the point that the indirect flight was an inconvenience to us all.

But I just couldn't bring myself to do it.

That was an awful travel department. The agents were shocking - for long-haul J flights, I'd often get a quote of 3x what I knew I could get. I used to end up dictating the fare basis to them over the phone!