A ludicrous, over-optimistic, potentially-disastrous airline connection (thanks, Galileo!)

by Janice Hough on September 2, 2009

jfk
Last month, I wrote about minimum connecting times, and how they can be, well, a little optimistic.

But today, in our Galileo reservations system, a service used by about a third of travel agents, I just might have found the most ludicrous, over-optimistic, potentially-disastrous, suggested connection, ever. Although, if any readers have found a worse one, I would love to hear about it in comments.

The itinerary in question, from Burlington, Vermont to Paris, France. A client wanted to arrive early in the morning to Paris. And the system shows a connection from JetBlue to Air France via JFK on September 20. Here’s the format display, at the risk of being overly jargony.

The letters and numbers simply refer to fare classes and available seats. But I had to read the times three times to believe it.

B6 633 Y4 S4 E4 K4 H4 Q4 B4 L0 V0 R0 BTVJFK 155P 315P
AF 23 P2 F1 A0 J9 C9 D6 I3 Z2 E1 O1 JFK CDG 430P 600A

In short, the suggested flights have the traveler arriving at 315p, and departing at 430p -r exactly one hour and fifteen minutes in JFK to make the connection. And these connection is supposed to work with carry-on or checked baggage.

For starters, JetBlue does not transfer bags to other carriers, so anyone checking luggage who was attempting this feat would need to claim the bags before heading over to Air France.

Even for travelers with carry-on bags, it does take a few minutes to get off the plane and into the terminal. At least. That doesn’t even consider the possibility of being at the back of the plane, or simply behind a slow moving traveling family.

Then there’s the little matter of switching terminals. JetBlue arrives into Terminal 5 at JFK, Air France leaves from Terminal 1. For those not familiar with JFK, that is as far away as it sounds. And involves going in and out of security. You could try to walk, or take the AirTrain.

But the train station is outside security, and is a short walk both from Terminal 5 and from Terminal 1. It runs every five minute, and takes two minutes between each station, so that means about eight minutes between the JetBlue and Air France terminals, once you are on the train.

And the mandatory advance check-in time for Air France. One hour.

Usain Bolt with carry-on bags would probably miss this connection. Not to mention mere mortals.

photo by wallyg/flickr/creative commons

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Tagged as: air france, check-in times, connecting times, connection, JetBlue, JFK airport

  • SirWired

    I had a Galileo-based corporate system return a nasty one last year. RDU->CVG->CDG with a connection time of 45 minutes. Cincinnati is a nice airport, but a 45-minute international connecting time? Yeah… that’s more than a bit close. Especially since CVG->CDG is a once-a-day flight. Yeah, I could still have made it to Paris after missing a CVG connection by quickly dumping me on a flight to ATL, which has plenty of CDG flights, but this was a major goof by Galileo.

    Delta’s website was not offering up this stupid itinerary, which tells me that Galileo has some problems in the connecting time part of the software, as I never seem to have these issues with the airlines themselves.

  • http://www.att.net vacationagent

    That must have been a GDS programming error. I hope you reported it to your Galileo help desk. My GDS shows that Jet Blue and Air France do not publish a minimum connecting time domestic to international at Kennedy and therefore the standard 75 minutes would apply. But even that would be risky with checked luggge.

    I would probably opt for the Delta/Air France code share flight that leaves Burlington at 1220p and gets to Kennedy at 152p. That way you could check your luggage through to Paris and get yourself through the terminals with some time to spare.

  • Amy

    Is Galileo supposed to automatically factor in transfer periods outside of certain time blocks? Does it automatically know what the terminal layouts of certain airports are? I am not an agent and I don’t understand the system. Is it just that the system gave you the best scenario without regard to checks or transfers within the airport? If so, then the system is just being the system, and thank goodness there is a human being to catch those things. Had Expedia or Orbitz done that booking, the traveler may not have caught it and ended up in a whirlwind of trouble.

  • Samantha

    October 2008, we were unable to make our connection from Charles DeGaulle to Seattle due to the 50 minute connection time. Our flight from Florence was delayed and when it arrived in CDG we raced to the Air France counter. The flight attendant was unwilling to issue our tickets and lets us board the plane 1/2 hour before takeoff.
    They spent at least an hour trying to book us on flights back to Seattle. They were stumped because the final leg of our initial tickets was actually Bellingham where flights are infrequent. Eventhough we told them ( and in French!) insistantly and numerous times we didn’t care about the Bellingham leg, just get us to Seattle. They “couldn’t” and wouldn’t book us new tickets. The next morning flight was their offer, with an insane compensation of staying at a hotel and given meal vouchers. If the bus to the hotel didn’t take 3 hours to arrive and deliver us to a hole in the wall hotel in a small town with nothing even in walking distance, we would have been placated.
    The short of this long saga is that we booked our round trip to Florence through Travelocity. The 50 minute connection between Florence and Paris should not be offered at all. A near unrealistic mad dash to make it in time, even for an athletic and well fit adult, is futile.
    Caveat Emptor! Don’t even think you can make a less than 1 hr connection, no matter where you’re flying!

  • Matthew in NYC

    I would never accept a domestic to international (or vice versa) connection of less than two hours. Depending on the airport that is cutting it fine. I used to fly Melbourne AU to JFK a couple of times a year. Qantas always had a two hour connection time, which was fine except that they would land four or five 747-400′s at the same time, with everyone having to clear immigration, pick up their luggage, clear customs, re check their bags, go through security and get to the gate. LAX on any morning is insane. Add one slightly late flight, or a CBP or TSA officer in a bad mood and those connections are history. I think I missed the connection more often than I made it.

  • http://www.shorttraveltips.com Vilmis @ Travel Tips

    @Samantha, you can make connections in less then an hour, if it is domestic flight and with carry-on only. But never do this with long international flights, especially ones which have only one flight per day to destination I need.

    P.S. As for CDG. Flew once and (hope) won’t do it ever again. They managed loose my luggage in airport, although it was 3 hours between the flights.

  • Trudy Richardson

    Once again this is an excellent reason to have a travel agent. Agents know and understand connect times and believe me I have questioned more than one pubished connect time. A good agent will advise and educate their client. First they must understand the importance of sufficient connection time. A savy agent would pick up on time issues and advise their client to choose another or for that matter never offer the flights that are poor connections.

  • Donna Sevilla

    This isn’t a Gallileo issue. It stems from whoever sets the minimum connecting times and transmits them to the reservation systems. Gallileo and the other GDS systems are programmed to offer connections based on minimum connecting time parameters. I just checked the JFK minimum connecting time between JetBlue (B6) and Air France (AF). For a domestic to international connection (D/I), they are only specifying 1hour and 15 minutes. Below is the SABRE display of minimum connecting time at JFK.
    T*CT-JFK/B6AF
    STANDARD.D/D…D/I…I/D…I/I.
    ONLINE 1.00 1.15 1.45 2.00
    OFFLINE 1.00 1.15 1.45 2.00
    I would agree that is a ludricrously small amount of time and would search for flights with more adequate time between connections.

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  • c. november

    This happens more often than you would think. Madrid is quite a big airport, and still when you check MCT between terminals 1/2/3 it gives an unrealistic 1h at most. If you take into account that the distance from the southernmost point of T1 to the northernmost of T3 is almost 3 km (1.5 mi approx) and there is no internal peoplemover (just unreliable shuttle buses), it’s preposterous to think that you can make a connection between two different carriers, arriving from an international flt to a domestic/EU flight in one hour. Two hours are hardly enough for going through migrations, customs, picking luggage up, finding the other company’s checkin area and making it there before the 40-min check in deadline most airlines apply now for european flights (1h for international).

    Transits between T1/2/3 and T4 are a slightly more reasonable 3hs minimum.

  • David Z

    As a so-called rule of thumb, guys, do you “add” like 30 minutes to 1 hour to the minimum time provided to find more realistic connecting flights?

  • http://leftcoastsportsbabe.com Janice Hough

    David, it’s an inexact science from my end, and I also like to consider “What’s the worst case scenario?” If you are connecting in say, Chicago or Atlanta and there’s another flight an hour later, then I am more likely to risk it. If you are connecting to an international flight and there isn’t another flight for a day, then I definitely advise padding the connection. It also depends a bit on the airport, JFK, Frankfurt and Heathrow are three that I find to be the among most over-optimistic. Munich, for example, is much easier. Also it does depend on luggage, if you are travelling with children or anyone elderly, etc…

  • Cat Lady

    My worst one was the 3rd change of schedule for a flight. The connecting time at ATL was a negative 5 minutes. When I called DL they had a hard time understanding why I thought there was a problem. I finally had to ask for a supervisor to get the problem fixed.

  • Check and Double Check

    Cat Lady, I thought I had a winner, but I do believe you have me beat on the connection time. No matter how highly recommended a travel agent is, always pay attention to every detail when booking a trip. I was purchasing a motor coach tour with air included in the package and had a travel agent try to book me from Houston to Amsterdam with a plane change in Frankfurt with a 30-minute window to get from one end of the airport to the other. Just getting off the plane can take that long! She was unhappy when I refused that itinerary, but you can’t imagine her chagrin when I called to her attention the fact that she had booked my return flight one week later than the date I requested. I offered to stay in Amsterdam the extra week if she would provide me with vouchers or a per diem for the hotel and meals plus a small stipend for sightseeing and souvenirs, but she did manage to make the change back to the original date requested. Darn! What really took the cake, though, was that when my original tour was cancelled and I was moved to a different departure date, she made exactly the same two mistakes on the second booking as she did on the first! Needless to say, I never used her again and whenever I refer friends to the agent I use now in the same agency, I strongly caution them to make sure they get the person I use and no one else in the agency. (Fortunately I had booked air through the tour company, so all of these changes were the responsibility of the travel agent to fix.)

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