Mon 14 Apr NGO/GUM UA172 2055/0135
After leaving the city at 1420 we arrived back at the airport at 1450, retrieved our rollaboards from the storage place then keen to get to the lounge & relax we headed to the security screening point with our boarding passes for UA172 that we'd received from NH in CTS earlier that morning.
Security wouldn't accept our NH issued boarding passes & told us they must be issued by UA. We noticed the laminated A4 card the person was clutching with a red cross in the box that said 'other airline boarding passes' verifying that. As our flight was 6 hours away and not wanting to hang around landside for the next several hours we needed to find a workaround to this situation so we went of in search of the UA checkin counters.
The general information board listed all the flights & the row number the checkin was located at however it stated that UA172 checkin didn't open until 1855 (2 hours prior to departure) which was still 4 hours away. The next plan of attack was to find some internet & a printer so we could log on the the UA website & try to reprint our boarding passes.
There were a few lounges landside but none had any arrangement with Priority Pass as they seemed to only be for people with credit cards issued in Asia by certain banks. We found a public computer upstairs & managed to access our UA boarding passes but when we went to print there was some error in Japanese. Grrrrrr. SO picks up the white courtesy phone & manages to get through to an English speaking help desk person who fixed the problem so we now had our A4 boarding passes in hand. As we left we noticed the computer on the left was in English - Doh!
Back at the screening point we proudly handed over our newly acquired OLCI United boarding passes but it seems there is a problem with them also. Out comes the laminated A4 card again & this time the guy looks the the 'home print' column & you guessed it - a red cross in that column too ie no deal.
A colleague of his came over who we'd seen on our first attempt so I thought we'd be given our marching orders again but instead she called through to the UA airport office who agreed that we could use the UA OLCI boarding passes to get through security and customs however we needed to present our passports to gate staff prior to boarding. I don't know whether travelling with HLO saved us as they wouldn't have had to do a bag search if we had to be offloaded due to incorrect documentation.
I felt like I was an AFFer booked on JQ35 domestically trying desperately to get a boarding pass issued in order to access the FLounge early! By the time we'd done our 'Race Around the World' challenge it was almost 1700 when we got to the Star Alliance lounge which is to the right after customs not far from the JAL Sakura Lounge for OW pax.
If you turn left after customs you'll find the KAL Lounge for Skyteam pax plus there's also a Centrair Global Lounge for certain pax with flights on China Eastern, China Airlines, Delta & Cathay Pacific.
The flight information monitor within the *A Lounge which lists a lot of flights however most flights have at least 2 codeshare flights which is a giveaway as several flights are all departing from the same gate. There was CX531 to HKG (codehare with JL & QR), TG647 to BKK (codeshare with NH), D7543 to KUL, OZ123 to SEL (codeshare with NH & TK), KE758 to SEL (codeshare with JL & KL), DL629 to MNL, UA172 to GUM (codeshare with NH) & DL612 to HNL.
Bangkok bound TG647 taxiing out.