Rephrasing a question I had in the comments of another question into a new question.
Me (Belgian) and my wife (South-Korean) are planning to travel from Seoul to Barcelona during a very busy (and expensive) time of the year. To reduce costs, I looked into making separate flight reservations.
My first flight would be from Seoul (Gimpo) to Beijing, with Asiana, landing at 9:50AM.
After that, we would have another reservation (separate ticket) with Aeroflot to fly from Beijing to Barcelona, leaving at 11:40AM (with layover in Moscow, but same ticket there).
We would only have carry-on luggage, so no checked-in luggage.
So, do we need a Chinese visa for this?
Is it reasonable (I'm willing to take some risk to save almost 1000$ per person), time-wise? I of course know that we are not covered if any flight delay on the first flight, leading us to miss our connection.
Can we stay in the transit zone, without having to go through customs? For this, we would have to do online check-in for Aeroflot in advance of course.
Any known problems for online checking with Aeroflot?