One or the other, not both
Twice in one week I get to watch the same tight international connection drama play out -- once with my husband returning from Poland, the other with the dog-daddies of the little Corgi I'm dog sitting. I'm writing this as I'm watching their FindFriends dot traverse the airport in Amsterdam cheering them on!
In both cases, they were booked onto Schengen zone intra-Europe flights with a 1-ish hour connection to a flight bound for the US (meaning they have to re-clear security). They were also both on the last flight of the day for their respective airlines at that airport.
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| They've got 15 minutes to get to that gate (and re-clear security!) – RUN! |
I mention all of this because of my recent flight home from Sydney. I was flying home at the end of Mardi Gras, so the only cheap Business Class flight home involved flying to Melbourne first. United has a loose partnership with Virgin Australia (they're not Star Alliance) and will happily book you a reward flight that includes Virgin legs. Since I've flown Virgin on that route many times, I'm well aware that they take SYD-MEL flight times as a vague suggestion, so I poked and poked at United.com until I got it to show me the award flight with the longest connection time I could muster -- 2h55m. Long story short: I speed-walked to my gate in Melbourne and arrived right as they were calling my group number. (My flight was the last United flight out of Melbourne that day, the LAX-bound flight leaves an hour before the SFO one.)
So yes, either: leave yourself an absolute minimum of 3 hours to connect internationally OR make sure there's a flight after yours you can move to, preferably on the same airline. Not both. But do keep in mind that if you're flying in Business Class (especially if you upgraded!) getting moved to that later flight might mean sitting in coach.
Well, I say all that and then I get this text:
So I guess I'll add the clause "unless you have a perpetually-late Armenian's travel karma" :)
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