Is 50 minutes connection time enough at EWR?

Our cruise in Nov ends in San Juan and we have booked flights home to UK with RCL. We are flying United from San Juan via EWR to LHR. We initially had a connection time of 1 hour 15 minutes but have just received an email to say this has reduced to 50 minutes. We don't know EWR at all so have no idea whether we have a good chance of making our flight to London or not.

Hoping someone can advise, thanks,

Julie

I would not be comfortable with 50 minutes, particularly connecting to an international flight.

Our cruise in Nov ends in San Juan and we have booked flights home to UK with RCL. We are flying United from San Juan via EWR to LHR. We initially had a connection time of 1 hour 15 minutes but have just received an email to say this has reduced to 50 minutes. We don't know EWR at all so have no idea whether we have a good chance of making our flight to London or not.

 

Hoping someone can advise, thanks,

 

Julie

You should contact United (call their phone number) and ask them to check on their "Minimum Connection Time" at EWR (Newark). A few years ago it was 60 minutes for connecting to an International Flight from a domestic flight (San Juan to EWR would be considered a domestic flight). I am not sure if United has since changed that minimum connection time. It does appear that most flights from SJU to EWR and from EWR to LHR use the same terminal (Terminal C) which is a good thing for a tight connection.

Can you make your flight with only 50 minutes? If your flight arrives on time, and you are close to the front of the aircraft so that you can be quickly off the plane, then you should be fine. If the airline allows you to book this flight then they are accepting some responsibility for you making the connection. That would mean if you missed the connection they would try to get you on their next flight without charging you any penalty. Most airlines will not allow (or discourage) bookings that fail to meet their minimum connection times. If you call United and the schedule change leaves you with less than their Minimum Connection Time then Untied should be willing to change your flights to meet their own requirements. In such a situation there would be no penalties assessed for the change.

Hank

I would also recommend changing flights if possible. EWR is a huge airport and they are notorious for flight delays, if if the weather is clear. Personally I like to have at least 2 hours when connecting at EWR.

Thanks for the replies.

I've called RCL and was able to get changed onto the later flight to LHR free of charge so panic over:)

Julie

You should contact United (call their phone number) and ask them to check on their "Minimum Connection Time" at EWR (Newark). A few years ago it was 60 minutes for connecting to an International Flight from a domestic flight (San Juan to EWR would be considered a domestic flight). I am not sure if United has since changed that minimum connection time. It does appear that most flights from SJU to EWR and from EWR to LHR use the same terminal (Terminal C) which is a good thing for a tight connection.

 

Can you make your flight with only 50 minutes? If your flight arrives on time, and you are close to the front of the aircraft so that you can be quickly off the plane, then you should be fine. If the airline allows you to book this flight then they are accepting some responsibility for you making the connection. That would mean if you missed the connection they would try to get you on their next flight without charging you any penalty. Most airlines will not allow (or discourage) bookings that fail to meet their minimum connection times. If you call United and the schedule change leaves you with less than their Minimum Connection Time then Untied should be willing to change your flights to meet their own requirements. In such a situation there would be no penalties assessed for the change.

 

Hank

About that bit implying that airlines somehow know what they are doing with re-scheduling and connection times and thus "allowing them"... that might be the case for an original booking.

However, with two totally different airlines within a few months of each other, we received notifications of schedule changes.

GOOD THING we paid attention.

In both cases, the new schedule had us arriving for the final long-haul leg *after* it would have already departed, by several hours :mad:

In each case, we ended up with the flights of our choice, including using connecting airlines that would not otherwise have been allowed, and in one case a routing we strongly preferred.

But the annoyance... we'd have preferred that they just kept the original schedule, or at least booked us automatically on a new flight schedule that wasn't impossible.

GC

That's what I don't get. Why do they even offer you such connecting flights if it's unlikely you'll make it. When booking ourselves I saw many with a stop less than 1hr inbetween and often questioned.

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Why do they even offer you such connecting flights if it's unlikely you'll make it.

The contrasting reason for keeping the MCT down to the lowest reasonably feasible number is that a chance to minimise the overall journey time is valuable. And particularly sp to the airline's most profitable customers, who are probably most used to dealing with misconnects and who are also the customers who are most likely to know how to get looked after best if they do misconnect.

Infrequent travellers and leisure passengers may have a rather lower risk tolerance, but they have the option of picking connections with a longer gap between flights if they choose.

And if there's a schedule change, then all you need to do is to work out what the best option is in the new schedules. If you want to minimise the risk of schedule changes between booking and flying, then book later - if, of course, you are prepared to put up with the corresponding disadvantage that the greater certainty may cost you more money. You can't have everything guaranteed, especially not in an extraordinarily complex industry running on wafer-thin margins.

That premise isn't correct, though: If an airline offers a connection it is highly likely that you will make it. It costs the airline money if you don't make the connection, so the airline has an incentive not to set an unrealistic Minimum Connection Time because it does not want to incur the costs of an unreasonable number of misconnects.

 

The contrasting reason for keeping the MCT down to the lowest reasonably feasible number is that a chance to minimise the overall journey time is valuable. And particularly sp to the airline's most profitable customers, who are probably most used to dealing with misconnects and who are also the customers who are most likely to know how to get looked after best if they do misconnect.

 

Infrequent travellers and leisure passengers may have a rather lower risk tolerance, but they have the option of picking connections with a longer gap between flights if they choose.

 

And if there's a schedule change, then all you need to do is to work out what the best option is in the new schedules. If you want to minimise the risk of schedule changes between booking and flying, then book later - if, of course, you are prepared to put up with the corresponding disadvantage that the greater certainty may cost you more money. You can't have everything guaranteed, especially not in an extraordinarily complex industry running on wafer-thin margins.

Shouldn't there be some sort of algo-checking such that changes that are made FOR the passenger, such as when the flight schedules change, can not include absolutely impossible connections?

I'm thinking of the two recent examples, where we received email notifications of a change of schedule, and in each case, as described above, the last leg (in both cases, the long-haul trans-ocean flight) would have departed before the "connecting flight" had arrived.

In one case, it was by less than an hour; in the other, by several hours.

?

Surely, programming can handle time comparisons/subtractions (or however the algorithms work) such that such an "impossible" outcome automatically generates "another try", until something that "works" is found, and then sent to the passenger.

No?

GC

Shouldn't there be some sort of algo-checking such that changes that are made FOR the passenger, such as when the flight schedules change, can not include absolutely impossible connections?

 

...

 

Surely, programming can handle time comparisons/subtractions (or however the algorithms work) such that such an "impossible" outcome automatically generates "another try", until something that "works" is found, and then sent to the passenger.

There is one really good reason why this approach might be adopted by an airline: schedule changes very often don't take place in isolation, but are part of a wider set of changes that are inserted into the timetable over a period. I have seen this most often on international flights, for which there are two well-defined IATA scheduling seasons every year. As the beginning of the season approaches, airlines finalise their schedules for the forthcoming season and update the timetables accordingly with schedule changes. But not all of this goes live at the same time. So what you can find is that the robotics do their work a couple of weeks later and offer something that's valid in the settled new timetable.

I have a good friend who used to be a travel agent in the days before computing power was good enough to do this sort of thing automatically. Schedule change season used to drive her up the wall, because an airline would make a set of changes and make a connection illegal. A week later, the airline would make another set of changes as part of the same finalisation process, and another connection would become illegal. Each time, there would have to be a manual rebooking. Running robotics after a lengthier gap means a higher chance to sort these things out once rather than several times - especially as each rebooking can necessitate cancelling the existing ticket and reissuing a new ticket.

However, the bottom line is that the airline has a real incentive to get the illegal connection sorted out, in the same way that it has an incentive not to allow unrealistically short connection times. Otherwise, there is simply more cost further down the line. And as soon as a schedule change has been made and causes difficulty, the passenger always has the option of proactively working out their preferred alternative and getting the rebooking done immediately, if they want to initiate that themselves.

I the past 5 years we have had two itineraries (United and American) that were modified by the airline into truly impossible schedules (connecting flights scheduled to leave before the first flight lands). Telephone calls to each airline fixed the problem (in one case we had to completely cancel and demand a refund) and we did ask how this could happen. In both cases we were told that the airline software does not do a good job with some schedule changes...but they gave us no further explanation. In the case of American, not only did they change us to an impossible schedule, but AA never even notified us (via text or e-mail) or the changes despite the fact that we are Frequent Flyers and have all of our contact info registered with the airline.

This is why we tell travel novices to continuously check existing reservations. We generally look about once a week when its more then a month to our trip and start looking more often as the travel day nears. In a perfect world the airlines get it right.....but its not even close to a perfect world :(.

Hank

I the past 5 years we have had two itineraries (United and American) that were modified by the airline into truly impossible schedules (connecting flights scheduled to leave before the first flight lands). Telephone calls to each airline fixed the problem (in one case we had to completely cancel and demand a refund) and we did ask how this could happen. In both cases we were told that the airline software does not do a good job with some schedule changes...but they gave us no further explanation. In the case of American, not only did they change us to an impossible schedule, but AA never even notified us (via text or e-mail) or the changes despite the fact that we are Frequent Flyers and have all of our contact info registered with the airline.

 

This is why we tell travel novices to continuously check existing reservations. We generally look about once a week when its more then a month to our trip and start looking more often as the travel day nears. In a perfect world the airlines get it right.....but its not even close to a perfect world :(.

 

Hank

American was one of the airlines we mentioned above, and yup, they never notified us.

And not only are we "frequent fliers" with all contact information fully up to date, but with American, DH is a lifetime [multi] million miler, or whatever they call it, plus lifetime Platinum (the way he qualified no longer "works", but he's got the status).

Actually, they had two *significant* changes for the same trip, but the changes were several weeks apart. Neither time did they notify us, and in both cases, the changes were not okay with us, and we changed the schedule upon "checking on our own and noticing the change".

But only one of these two changes was truly impossible, in the sense of the connecting flight would have arrived *after* the next flight had already departed.

Thank goodness we check frequently.

GC

We as consumers need to be proactive and keep checking on our own flight schedules. Airlines are always adjusting, fine tuning or just changing things. Check monthly, if you see something you don't like then call and ask them to fix it. Lets all be responsible here.