We left Venice on April 30th. We booked a private car to get us from cruise terminal to airport and had booked a later flight (2 pm) to make sure we had enough time. Well, It's about 20-25 min from cruise terminal to airport. You can not check in for your flight until 2 hours before take-off!! So if you get there early (like most of the cruise passengers) you will be standing with your luggage for hours!!
Where you need to give yourself more time is getting thru Atlanta. AND if you buy any liquids at the duty free shops in Europe, you better put it in your luggage in Atlanta or it will be THROWN AWAY because you have to go back thru a security check point!
In case you've never flown international before: If you fly into Atlanta, you have to go thru customs which can take a very long time. We had 3 flights and about 1000 people trying to clear customs and trying to make connections. it was not pretty.
After you clear customs, you have to go and get your bags and drop them off on a conveyor belt so that they can be zipped off to your connecting flight- this is when you stick that lemoncello in your bag. Then you have to go back thru security checkpoint - remove shoes, belt, etc. and if you have a water bottle, or anything over the allotted 3.4 ounces, it gets trashed.
We had a 2 hour layover and barely made our connection. Give yourself more time.
Posted by
Green Bay
21153 posts
Good advice for making a connection coming home for ANY airport.
Posted by
San Antonio TX, United States
2393 posts
I had that liquor problem leaving from Malaga through Zurich - I bought a sherry sampler in the little bottles at the airport in Malaga - just in case. Wouldn't you know we had to go through security again in Zurich and they were not in my 311 bags. I begged and re-arranged my 311 bags until she finally sent me on my way! I was very glad I did not buy any large bottles.
Posted by
Atlanta, GA, USA
2790 posts
If you connect to a domestic flight anywhere in the US you have the same set up as Atlanta. You clear customs at your point of entry and then go through these steps.
(Generally the hold up is immigration not customs however)
Posted by
Kenmore, WA
194 posts
if you buy any liquids at the duty free shops in Europe, you better put it in your luggage
Found out the hard way how a bottle of liquid which was purchased on the "safe" side of the security wall in a duty-free shop at Heathrow magically turns into a security threat once it reaches North America.
In my case, it was an 16 year-old bottle of scotch. We connected through Vancouver on our way to SEA, de-boarding the plane through a hermetically sealed hallway that led directly from the plane to the U.S. security checkpoint. It was literally impossible for anything that wasn't already approved to spend 10 hours in the overhead compartment of a fully loaded plane crossing the Atlantic to be in my possession. In other words, everything I was carrying was already approved to carry onto a plane.
Yet I was told that the bottle wasn't allowed to proceed due to the 3.4 ounce rule. It was a tight connection, so I had no chance to transfer the offending item into a piece of checked luggage. I left it on the counter and walked away. The folks at the checkpoint sort of chuckled, and added it their collection behind the counter. In hindsight, I suppose I could have poured it out in front of them and kept the bottle as a souvenir, but that would have just been a waste of good scotch!
Posted by
Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, USA
14738 posts
It's a learning experience, isn't it?
Someone here recently posted something that made so much sense regarding the security after Customs. They explained that since your checked luggage had been in your possession, even for the short time thru Customs, in theory you could transfer something that is OK to be in checked luggage (knives?) but not OK to carry on. That just had not computed with me until I read that.
I like to have 3 hours at the airport where I come back in the US.
Posted by
OP
7 posts
Carol-you're correct, it is immigration ( I lumped it all together) .
Pam - I had never realized the issue with possibly pulling something out of luggage, but that certainly makes the whole process seem more appropriate.
Posted by
Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, USA
14738 posts
Yeah, it's a lightbulb moment, isn't it! In all the reading I've done on this forum (and others) I had never seen that spelled out. I guess it should have occurred to me but being the world's least threat to international security it did not.
Posted by
Tresana, Highlands Ranch, CO, USA
23626 posts
Once you have had access to your checked luggage you are consider dirty even if you didn't have any checked luggage. So you have to be made clean again. But it would be better if we used correct terminology. The station you hit first is immigration, then your luggage pick-up, then customs (mostly turn in your form and keep walking) then the luggage drop off or re-check area. Always a good practice is to check your tags to be sure your luggage is headed in the right direction, and on to your connecting flight and another TSA line. This where Global Entry is worth it's weight in gold.
Posted by
Kenmore, WA
194 posts
Just to be clear, in my case, we had no checked luggage at all. All I had when I went through the security check in Vancouver was the carry-on stuff from the flight I had just gotten off of that had already cleared security in Heathrow. So there was never any "cross-contamination" between checked luggage and my carry-on items.
It was a classic case of a big bureaucracy blindly applying rules without actually thinking it through. If nothing more than 3.4 oz should EVER be in a carry-on, then why did they allow me to carry-on an entire bottle purchased just a few feet from the gate in Heathrow in the first place? Given that I was in a secure zone the entire time (first in Heathrow, then on the plane, then in the sealed hallway leading to the next checkpoint), the question remains... at which point in that process did the the scotch transform from an inert duty-free purchase into a security threat?
They did offer me the opportunity to check my carry-on stuff on the spot, but since it was a tight connection, I didn't have time to do that and actually make my connecting flight. Which I suppose means the highly-trained security folks thought that the item that was such a huge security threat in my carry-on would magically be transformed back into an inert object by being placed in the cargo hold.