Effective October 1, 2014, American Airlines will no longer allow you to check bags through to your final destination unless your tickets are on AA, US or a Oneworld partner. This means, for instance, that if you have booked two separate reservations on two separate carriers, you cannot check in with American and have your luggage tagged through to the airport where that second carrier is taking you.
Most reservations are on one reservation and one ticket, so no matter the mix of carriers, this rule change will not impact that. There will also be no impact if your second itinerary is with another Oneworld carrier, as might be the case if you needed to position for a BA or US flight. Still, this is an important change to those in this hobby in a number of instances. The most significant, which prompted me to make this post, would be in the instance where you might have an award booking on a non-OneWorld carrier, who may still be an American Airlines codeshare partner, but had to purchase a revenue positioning flight on American For example:
- You’re itching to go to Hawaii, and SEA-OGG is wide open on Alaska metal – but there isn’t any space to get you from NYC-SEA for that flight. If you were to book a separate, paid flight on American, AA will not check that bag through to Hawaii for you. You will need to pick up and re-check it in Seattle
This will apply to situations like the one above for AA’s non-alliance partners. One outstanding question is whether this impacts interlining luggage onto an OpenSkies flight – currently listed as a codeshare partner on AA’s site, but also a Oneworld “affiliate” member due to being a BA subsidiary. I’ve put that out to the AA social media team and will update when I have a response.
For what it’s worth, this aligns American’s rules with the interline luggage policy that US Airways has been enforcing for a number of months. It’s another example of the combined airline aligning standards and policies to the lower common denominator between the two constituent airlines. This change really hurts when you pay to position for an award on a non-alliance partner.
HT: JonNYC / Flyertalk
Thanks a lot for this useful information. Hah – this is crazy policy. Suppose i book a flight to India through Etihad with a halt at AUH, it is going to take too much time to get the luggage checked out and check back in at AUH. From what i have seen the time difference is just two hours and it may put lot of pressure on the passengers. Why are airlines becoming ridiculously crazy by announcing useless policies that add no value to either them or their customers? The only consolation is that i can still use Qatar or Cathay to fly to India without being affected by this stupid policy.
Remember that if its on the same ticket as the aa flight you are fine. Its only if you book two separate tickets that it comes up. But I do agree, its not customer friendly.
Thanks for the clarification, awty. Suppose i book the route RDU-JFK-AUH-MAA, then i would be booking separate tickets from RDU to JFK through AA and JFK-AUH-MAA through Etihad, both using AA miles. In that case, i would have to check out and again check the baggage at JFK, correct? I assume i dont need to do that again in AUH though. Please confirm.
Just because you’re flying two carriers doesn’t mean it needs to be on multiple tickets. If you’re using AA miles to fly RDU-JFK-AUH-MAA, there are very few reasons why AA couldn’t issue that award on one ticket. The more common scenario would be that you booked JFK-AUH-MAA as an AA award on Etihad, but the RDU-JFK segment had no award space. In that case, you might buy a separate ticket RDU-JFK to position for your award, and in that case, AA wouldn’t check your bags on to MAA. That’s just because you can’t combine paid and award segments on one ticket, not because you’re switching carriers. When you call AA to book that award, as long as all of the space is there RDU-MAA, that can be issued as one ticket and you’ll have no problem. Does that make sense?
Thanks for the detailed clarification. Got it now.