Rules and commonsense don't necessarily mix. I was booking an award flight with American Airline miles. Because they can be hard to get I booked once the date opened up for the outbound, but not the return flight since the date wasn't open yet. When I booked the return flight they made me purchase the ticket at the Manila ticket office because it is a Philippine law for tickets originating in the Philippines, so they can get some kind of travel tax out of you. This is a pain in the butt. I obviously wasn't booking a ticket out of the Philippines, but a round trip ticket since I already had ticket to the Philippines. That said the purchase appeared as two one way tickets. I don't know what the right answer is, but I can certainly see how a ticket that terminates in HK, could be looked at the way they did. There are other things like inter airline agreements that may allow larger carriers to know there is another ticket. They will even issue each other tickets and transfer the baggage. Ex231, was your wife traveling on Cebu Pacific? Cebu Pacific may not participate in such agreements. Sorry to hear you got screwed, so did I and no amount of commonsense was going to get the travel tax back for me. Good luck.

 

Hong Kong is a country where Immigrations is not interested whether an airline passenger in transit has a passport with a validity of less than 30 days, what is only relevant when entering the country. So it really does not matter on which flight you will arrive @HKG international airport. As long as you stay on the air side waiting there for your connecting flight to final destination, no problem .....except for Cebu Pacific of course. Only in the PH more fun.

 

Yes, my comment was so readers wouldn't mistakenly extrapolate HK rules to every country as that would be a mistake. For example I know a Filipina that needed a US transit visa to fly from Singapore to Mexico with a couple hour layover in the US.