Venice Airport and getting back through Atlanta

Good advice for making a connection coming home for ANY airport.

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.

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)

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.