Tradewind Interline Agreements - UA, AA, BA

KevinS

Senior Insider
Tradewind has interline agreements with United, American, and British Airways. In order for luggage transfers to work, tickets must be purchased on the same itinerary. My initial take is that this is most useful for people travelling from the US to SBH on UA or AA. I’ll have to wait and see if this adds anything on the return trip. See below:

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We have already purchased our tickets for April on AA and Tradewind separately.....assuming luggage transfer won’t work for us??
 
My understanding of interline baggage is that the flights must be on the same itinerary. There’s a chance that a friendly checkin agent may work with you, but I wouldn’t count on it.
 
On the return trip thru SJU don’t all the checked luggage have to go thru XRay? And the Tradewind people then take them to the ticketing area?
 
Will have to read all of the above again, but on surface, if doing your tix online, how can you do 1 ticket when the carriers have separate websites ? When I was a travel consultant, I could do Winair/WM with USAirways as 1 ticket eventually WM & American on 1 ticket. So to get 1 ticket with Tradewind & another 1 of the mentioned carriers, I would think you'd need to have a travel agency do your tix ? Oui ?
 
Beware- we have found putting everything thing on one ‘ticket ‘ can often be considerably more expensive.

Yesterday, I ran both a UAL to SBH via Tradewind and the two flights separately for our May trip and the single ticket was a couple hundred dollars more. Conversely, a couple of years ago, we flew from Paris to SBH with Air France's interline agreement and the Winair ticket was effectively free.
 
Computer programs dictate the fares and there appears to be little logic to us customers.
As JEK demonstrates, if you google your starting and endpoints, you will receive options to book that passage. The problem we find is you are not often offered all of the options. For example, Tradewind has many flights each day and it may be challenging to pick a connection time between flights. We always err on picking a little more time than the ‘legal’ connection times offered. But if you choose the JEK option, your bag will be checked all the way. However, on the return, you enter the U.S. in San Juan, pass through with your baggage and as Andy points out your bag has to go through the agricultural inspection and receive the inspected tag.
 
With Tradewind, extra $100 will effectively check our bags all the way and still save us money. Plus, we get a personalized escort through the terminal.
 
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