Baggage + connections

[bucks]

Just a quick question in regards to baggage on these flights i will be taking this month.

I am going to Australia from Dublin via USA with UA and i was just wondering if anyone knows if my baggage will be sent to my connecting flights automatically.

Here are the flights.

Dublin - Heathrow (arrive 10.20)
Heathrow - JFK (depart 13.20)

2 days later

JFK - San Francisco (arrive 21.09)
San Francisco - Sydney (depart 22.15)

As you will see i will only have just over an hour to catch my connecting flight in San Francisco.

Also, i dont suppose anyone has flown this route before or knows what the service is like with United?

Any help appreciated.

Cheers.

[Memetic]

Assuming your inbound flight is on time :}

As you are already in the US you will not have to collect your bags, clear customs and recheck them so they should go straight through - as long as the time you have exceeds the minimum connect time for San Francisco.

If your flights are all on one ticket then the travel agent should (would?) not have been able to book flights allowing less than this minimum connect time between sectors. If you booked two separate flights then you may have allowed less than this and things might get interesting - especially if you are changing airlines.

You'll probably be fine - but why not pack the bare essentials in your hand luggage.

[Globaliser]

Are both the connections on a single ticket? If so, the check-in agent will almost certainly presume that you want your bags checked through to your final destination, although they often ask to make sure that you do.

If the connections are on different tickets, then you may have to take the initiative and ask for this.

Any transfer of baggage entails some risk that the bag will misconnect. But you have to balance that against the fact that there is also a risk that a bag will be mishandled even on a single sector, plus the hassle of reclaiming it and checking it in at the transfer point.

At LHR I suspect that you will have a terminal change from T1 to T3, which is a fair hike. If your bag will be transferred for you, you can do the transfer entirely airside through the Flight Connections Centre.

At SFO, you may not have enough time to reclaim the bag and recheck it because of your short connection, so I would definitely ask the airline to transfer the bag automatically. Ask the check-in agent whether they have a special label for short connections to identify the bag as needing priority handling. As you seem to be doing a UA-UA connection there should be less risk of something going wrong.

As far as service on UA is concerned, I wouldn't raise your expectations too high. For example, bring your own amenity pack.

[bucks]

Thanks for your answers.

All the flights are on the one ticket so im hoping that everything will go according to plan but we all know what the airline industry is like.

As for United, i have heard a few stories myself but as long as they get me there ill be happy.