Reflections on World Travel
Impossible Flight Connections — Do your research!
What Stockholm and Chicago have in common
We were living in France for a year when my brother came to visit from Seattle. It was time for him to check-in for his return flight home when he happened to mention, “Do you think fifty-five minutes will be enough time to change planes in Chicago?”
I looked at his itinerary. “Not a rat’s chance!”
As a frequent flyer on United, I suspect I’ve changed planes in Chicago well over a hundred times, usually on a domestic connection. Can you do that in fifty-five minutes? If your flights are on time, it’ll be tight, but doable.
Connecting from a domestic flight to an international departure? Same deal. There are no additional barriers in leaving the country. You just walk across the concourse and get in the line for Paris, Berlin, or Tokyo.
But here’s the catch! Arrive in Chicago from one of those places and the plane is going to drop you in Terminal Five along with all the other international arrivals. That’s where you have to clear immigration (passport control), wait for and retrieve your baggage from the carousel, pass through the customs gate (typically unnoticed by personnel stationed there,) then PUT. YOUR. BAG. BACK. ON. THE BELT!… to recheck it to your bag to your final destination!
Really America? Can’t we figure out how to check our bags through? Europe does a pretty good job with this and they’ve got a bazillion different countries do deal with.
But wait. That’s not all…
After you throw your bag back on the belt, you get to walk out of the secure area of the airport, then take a shuttle train back to Terminal One where all the domestic United flights depart. This means that you’ll have to pass through security again just as if you were arriving at the airport for the first time. God help you if you’ve lost a bag, causing a delay as you stay back to fill out all the paperwork. Minimum transfer time with an international arrival at Chicago, O’Hare. THREE HOURS!
To be fair, it’s not just Chicago. That policy of pulling your bags and walking out of customs is protocol for all US airports with international arrivals. It just so happens that Chicago O’Hare has a particularly unfortunate layout. In fact, for a while there, when they were renovating the shuttle train, you had to get on a bus that took you out of the airport entirely and back into rush hour traffic to cycle back into the queue for departing flights. Compare this with the spiffy terminal in Munich where international gates are literally stacked on top of the domestic gates so you simply head upstairs to make your connection. Or Singapore, where they have not one, but two air-train systems, one inside security (air-side) and one outside security (land-side), so you can make a connection to anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes.
This brings me to the irritating experience I had at Stockholm’s Arlanda airport a few days ago, where again, with less than three hours connection time, I’d still be in Sweden.
I’ve only flown through Stockholm once before years ago, arriving in Terminal Five and departing from Terminal Three. I was blown away. The décor is beautiful, the concourses are wide, and the signage is excellent, including interactive touch screens that will map out your transfer from gate to gate — unless as it turns out, you’re transferring to Terminal Two or Four. Illogical, I know.
It didn’t help that I was rejected from the Star Alliance lounge right off the bat. (Totally a first-world problem, but here we go.) I had booked both flights on SAS Airlines, a Star Alliance partner, with a connecting flight from Stockholm to Riga, Latvia on Air Baltic. The very nice woman in the SAS lounge said, “You’re not connecting to a SAS flight, so you cannot stay here!”
“But I just arrived on a SAS flight. And we have a three-hour layover.” I’m sure I looked lonely and pathetic.
“Yes. Too bad. We don’t honor that. And besides. You’re in the wrong terminal, anyway. You need to go to Terminal Two!”
Grumble, grumble, gripe, gripe… we left, in search of Terminal Two. That took us down the escalator, out through the baggage area (At least our bags were checked through) and literally out onto the street with sporadic signage for Terminal Two that indicated that we’d need to board the train signposted for Stockholm and get off at the next stop.
“Are you sure we’re not going to end up in downtown Stockholm?” my wife asked. Experience gave her due cause for trepidation.
“Truthfully, I’m not sure we’re not taking this train all the way to Latvia!” I was still irritated with the woman in the lounge.
One stop later, we’re off the train at the foot of a huge escalator that took us up into the very modest Terminal Two, right at the foot of the security line. Thankfully, there were less than a dozen people ahead of us.
Bear in mind by this point in our travels, we had cleared security at Newark Liberty Airport near New York City, then again in Mallorca when were boarded our flight headed for Stockholm. That’s two major airport security check-points with the very same carry-ons in tow. So, you can imagine the surprise when every one of our bags was tagged at security when checking back into the airport (that we had just walked out of!) to catch our 50-minute flight to Latvia.
“Perhaps you have an e-reader. Let’s run it again.”
“Perhaps you have toothpaste. Let’s run it again.”
“Apparently… you have a corkscrew in your backpack. Where is it?!”
I do?!? I needed that corkscrew in Mallorca! “I have no idea. I didn’t know I had one.”
The nice guy at security was kind but persistent, pulling more and more stuff out of my backpack that hasn’t been cleaned out in years! “Could it be in this pocket?” I just stood by with a helpless, and hopeless, expression on my face.”
Finally, after the seventh or eighth pass through the metal detector, and with the contents of my aging backpack strewn all over the metal table, he located my beloved corkscrew in a small inner pocket. You know the kind, with the little blade attached so you can cut the foil at the top of the bottle. I’ve had them confiscated in airports on at least four continents over the years.
“Ah! There it is. We found it.” The security guy seemed proud of his accomplishment. Meanwhile, I suspect we’d been at the security counter for at least twenty minutes by now.
“Sorry I had to empty out all your stuff.” Then, he handed me the corkscrew to put back in my bag! The very weapon he’s been searching for, returned to the owner to go on board the flight.
Thankfully, the SAS lounge attendant had thrown us out on the street or we would have never made that flight. As it was, we barely had time to grab food from the singular restaurant in Terminal Two before boarding our flight.
The moral of the story: (Says this seasoned traveler who should most definitely know better.)
Do your research!
Most airports have websites with a graphic replication of the arrivals and departures boards, including terminal information. And if you simply type “Arlanda terminal 3 to terminal 2 into a web search, it’ll likely take you right to Trip Advisor where you can read other people’s experiences about the connecting flight they almost caught.
As it turns out, the only connection you can count on is the one you’ve just made.
I typically write about naturist, or clothes-free travel. If that sounds even a little intriguing to you, you might want to check out my other blog.
I write about naturism, travel, and other parts of the human experience simply for the joy of writing. Totally worth it. But every time somebody spends time reading one of my stories, I earn a few cents to help pay the overhead costs of being a blogger. It’s only a few dollars a month to subscribe to Medium, which gives you access to thousands of authors and their work. And if you subscribe by clicking through the link below, I receive an incentive for that as well. Support naturism and thoughtful writing. Subscribe to MEDIUM… below. :)