What happens when you book a flight to Copenhagen on one airline and your transatlantic flight on another, leaving yourself barely over an hour between them? One traveller recently found out — and lived to write about it.
The setup: a family returning home to Chicago wanted to avoid a pre-dawn drive from Basel to Zurich. Award space on SAS out of Zurich existed, but rebooking the itinerary would have cost around 75 US dollars in fees, and driving to Zurich meant roughly an hour on the road versus fifteen minutes to Basel airport. So instead of changing the award ticket, the traveller booked a cheap separate ticket on Norwegian from Basel to Copenhagen — 177 euros for all four family members — and gambled that a 65-minute connection onto the SAS business class flight to Chicago would work.
It's worth understanding why this is risky. When you fly on separate tickets, the second airline owes you nothing if the first flight is late. Miss the connection and you're buying a new seat or rebooking at your own expense. Here, the stakes were high: a business class award seat across the Atlantic. And the connection itself wasn't easy — it involved moving from Copenhagen's Schengen zone to the non-Schengen international area, where passport queues can stretch a long way.
There was a second complication. The traveller's wife holds a US Green Card rather than a passport, which meant online check-in for her SAS flight couldn't be completed remotely — her documents had to be verified in person at the transfer desk. That added a mandatory stop to an already tight timeline.
On the day, the flight left Basel early and looked set to arrive ahead of schedule. Then poor weather intervened: circling near Copenhagen and a late gate arrival, at the far end of the terminal, no less. With under an hour remaining, the family sprinted to the SAS transfer desk, where — with 40 minutes to departure — an agent issued the missing boarding pass. Passport control for Schengen passport holders moved quickly, though lines for non-Schengen citizens looked painfully long. There was even time for a cinnamon bun in the SAS lounge before reaching the gate 26 minutes before departure. The gamble paid off — barely.
What should ordinary travellers take from this? Connecting on separate tickets is a genuine gamble, not a hack to attempt casually. If you do it, build in buffer time, know exactly where the transfer desk and passport control sit at your connecting airport, and sort out check-in quirks — like Green Card verification — before travel day. Citing a cheap fare that costs less than an airline change fee is clever, but it only works when everything runs your way. This time it did, with a margin of 26 minutes.
Story credited to Live and Let's Fly.
