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My wife is Philippine national and needs a visa for a lot of countries. When she came to live with me in Aruba, I booked 3 different tickets: Cebu to Shenzhen (China), Shenzhen to Brussels (Belgium), Belgium to Aruba.

Now, some of these airlines will not send her checked luggage to her end destination. So, to solve the visa problem, she travelled without checked luggage and only her hand luggage, because she could not leave airside to get her luggage and re-check it.

Are there any another option or idea how to do this, so she is able to travel with luggage?

We are going to travel in April/May to the following:

Aruba - CEBU (Philippines) / Cebu - Nanning (China) / Nanning - Aruba

She has no USA visa and probably won't be able to get one. So, the only way is through Holland. If we buy Aruba - Cebu (Philippines) through Holland with KLM the ticket cost Euro 2100.00 while, if we buy them separately it's about $1500.00 - $1600.00. This is per person.

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    Book a single ticket, or get transit visas. Nov 24, 2018 at 17:43
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    Extracting your luggage during unloading of one plane and getting it to the next flight in your itinerary is one of the services that make a single ticket more expensive than the separate flights. Nov 24, 2018 at 17:58
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    If it's impractical to secure visas, and too expensive to travel to countries that don't require visas, then travel only with hand luggage and buy clothes etc. after arrival. Nov 24, 2018 at 18:12
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    Also, if you can get a visa, or visa-free entry, but your wife cannot, you may be able to take one allowance of checked luggage. She would wait for you in the departures area while you rechecked the luggage. Nov 24, 2018 at 19:40
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    Being allowed to board the flight if your onward connection if on a different ticket and you don't have a visa for the layover country can be problematic in itself, no matter whether you have checked luggage. Often the inbound airline could be fined for transporting a visa-less passenger if you end up stranded at the connection point (because of delays or cancellations). Nov 25, 2018 at 2:04

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It's possible, but it might depend on luck/kindness of airport staff, and perhaps time if you're in a rush - it might be tricky.

Example: I was flying from Dushanbe, Tajikistan to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan via Tashkent, Uzbekistan (layover) on two separate tickets, which were very cheap. I realised as I landed in Tashkent that I had no visa for Uzbekistan, and my bags would come out on the carousel, where I couldn't get to them.

I spoke to a staff member, who radio'd a colleague, who found my bags and rechecked them for me to the new destination.

Something similar happened to me once in a transit in Manila, although I wasn't sure how or why. I was escorted under armed guard out to the baggage carousel to identify my bag, so that it could be checked in again. Which was weird as that time it was a single ticket with a 3 hour stop in MNL.

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