American Airlines baggage "tracking"!

The BBQ Pit
1

My wife returned yesterday from a last-minute, weekend trip to Switzerland. Since she was only going to be there for less than 48 hours, she put everything into a roll-aboard bag and a briefcase. This would assure that she wouldn’t have to check anything, right? Not quite.

Her return flight was from Geneva to Brussels, then Brussels to Chicago. Brussels Airlines told her that she would have to check her roll-aboard bag. It was, “not possible,” for her to bring it aboard. This bag has never failed to fit nicely in the overhead bin of every plane she’s ever flown, including ATRs. I suppose some of my ire should be saved for Brussels Airlines, but AA is who we’re dealing with, so let’s focus on them.

Her plan outbound from Geneva was delayed, and as a result she barely made her connection to Chicago. We were, therefore, not surprised that her checked bag did not arrive in Chicago with her. Unfortunately, that means having American Airlines “trace” the bag.

Over 24 hours after her return (which means something like 32 hours after boarding the first airplane), American Airlines still has no idea where the bag is. One man I spoke to earlier today said that AA had just put out an “international trace” on the bag. Apparently, they spend a day or so just hoping it turns up at the destination city. You mean, nobody thought to contact Brussels to see if it might be sitting there?

And here’s the other thing. In this day and age of heightened security, and constant fear that the turrists are going to get us all, nobody has a problem with the fact that an unaccompanied bag is floating around the international airport network unaccounted for? How fucking hard is it to round up all of the unclaimed baggage at the end of the day, zap it with a bar code scanner, and a. send it on its merry way, and b. have this data accessible so someone can say, “We’re very sorry. Your bag has made an unscheduled trip to Mumbai, but we’ll have it to you just as quickly as we can?”

For that matter, why do they bother with the fancy bar-coded labels if they are apparently incapable of doing anything with the information presumably encoded on the baggage tag? I’ve been on airplanes where they’ve had to remove a piece of baggage because someone didn’t get on the plane, and they didn’t seem to have any problem knowing that the bag was on the airplane. Surely there are a couple of bytes floating around cyberspace somewhere that at least indicate the last time this bag was accounted for, and might provide a starting point for the search.

I simply refuse to believe that baggage tracking is this sloppy. I understand the fact that a delayed flight can cause a bag to not make the connection, but 24 hours seems like plenty of time for someone to at least be able to put their hands on the bag and be able to say where it is. Fuckwits.

2

On a flight from St. Louis to New Hampshire many years ago, I had to check my carry-on for my connection from Boston to Manchester. The plane was a small commuter and didn’t have sufficiently large overhead bins. So I “gate checked” my bag. This involved handing my bag to a guy standing next to the plane (no jetway for this flight) whose entire job consisted of putting gate-checked luggage on the plane. Mine was the only one on this flight.

Come to Manchester–no bag.

It took them an hour and a half to figure out the problem, which was that the guy who was supposed to put my bag on the plane… just didn’t. Stood there with my bag and watched the plane taxi away. Too complicated a task, I guess.

3

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine flew into Baltimore on Southwest and his bag didn’t arrive. When he went to the desk, they took a whole bunch of quite specific details about the bag. I asked them why they couldn’t just scan his baggage receipt and find the bag in the system that way, and was told they have no way of doing this. That just seemed bizarre to me. What’s the point of a unique barcode identifier if it can’t be used for tracking the item in question?

Regarding this paragraph:

Well, i’ve never seen your wife’s luggage, but if Brussels Airlines are starting to crack down on selfish assholes who insist that their rolling bags are carry-on, even though they barely fit down the aisle, then more power to them.

Every flight i take there are dozens of people with carry-on luggage that is clearly larger than the airlines’ own carry-on size limits. Sure, these bags generally fit in the overhead bins (but sometimes only sideways, rather than wheels in), but if more than about one-third of the passengers have such bags, overhead space is generally full well before all passengers have stowed their luggage. It’s a fucking pain in the ass, and i’d make an effort to fly any airline that enforced its own carry-on size limits.

4

The whole barcode thing works brilliantly, until a tag snags on one of the conveyor belts and gets pulled off the case.

For this reason, one of the pieces of travel advice I’ve heard, and have used (when making such connections), is taking a plain piece of paper and writing your whole itinerary plus contact numbers on it. Place it in the case just before opening. Then, if it does happen to end up in the honest ‘who the hell does this belong to’ pile, they’ll figure it out pretty quickly.

5

Security blew up the bag.
Sorry

What?

6

I for one would avoid them. I tend to travel with an oversized item, which cannot be checked, which exceeds the dimensions of that ubiquitous metal basket, but also weights under 4kg and fits into any overhead locker. If an employee isn’t able to employ common sense and say “oh, that’s a violin”, then the airline is in the wrong.

(Random anecdote from a few weeks ago, which maybe belongs here: flying from a small local airport (Norwich), I went to take my laptop out of my bag. I heard a chuckle, and was told “we know what a computer looks like, and it’s the same in the bag”.)

7

Using common sense to allow an unusual object like a violin is one thing.

Allowing the majority of the passengers to fly with rolling cases that clearly exceed the size limits is something quite different. I’m sorry if you can’t see that.

8

Regarding your second comment, I was not with my wife, and for all I know Brussels Airlines has more restrictive standards for carry-on luggage than American carriers. That’s why the focus of my pit is the baggage lack-of-tracking. For the record, it’s a small roll-aboard that has always fit wheels-first into the overhead bin of even the smallest airplanes. I have actually placed it inside the “your bag must fit in here” template at an airport somewhere, and it fit.

Your first comment is exactly my problem with this whole scenario. I had one AA rep tell me yesterday that they simply don’t have FedEx/UPS-style tracking, because it’s too expensive to implement.

BTW, it’s Wednesday morning, and still no clue as to where this piece of baggage might be. The more I think about it, the more frustrating this all becomes. It seems to me that unclaimed luggage at a given baggage claim falls into one of four categories:
[ol]
[li]Properly tagged, right destination, unclaimed,[/li][li]Properly tagged, wrong destination,[/li][li]Barcoded tag missing, other ID tags present,[/li][li]and no exterior ID tags.[/li][/ol] Category 1 is pretty easy to deal with. Bags go in a holding area, airline attempts to contact owner, gets sent to some centralized location after 10 days (or some other reasonable time frame).

Category 2 bags get sent on the next available flight to the passengers original destination. After that, treat like Category 1.

Category 3 bags are a little tougher, as someone will need to look up the passenger’s name and find out which flight they were on. Once that’s done, the bag can be re-tagged and treated as a Category 1 or 2 bag.

Category 4 is obviously the toughest. However, I can’t believe that there are that many bags every day that are completely unidentifiable externally (if there are, then the airlines seriously need to revise their processes). However, when you file a claim with the airline they take down a fair amount of information like the make of the bag, color, style, and identifiable contents. So, once a day each location can take last night’s list of bags-to-be-on-the-lookout-for, and try to match them up. If it becomes identifiable, treat it like one of the categories above. If not, keep it in the queue for 5 days, or 10 days or something, then send it to baggage hell.

For category 1, 2, and 3 (once re-tagged) there should be a computer record somewhere as to the bag’s location. If, in our case, I assume that all external ID has been lost from my wife’s bag, I have a hard time believing that there are very many green Delsey roll-aboards containing two black Anne Klein suits, a chrome-and-black Conair hairdryer, and some Swiss chocolate (among other things). I think it’s completely ridiculous that after 3 days there is absolutely no clue as to its location.

I’m going to trot out to O’Hare in a bit on the off-chance that it is actually sitting there somewhere. Mt wife’s boss told her of being in a similar situation once, going to O’Hare, and spying his bag through a window in a door. The luggage person actually came out of that room and told him his bag wasn’t there. I’d like to think that employee was mortified when he pointed to it and then left with his bag, but I’m sure he or she wasn’t.

9

You know what? This is a perfectly well-timed rant. I was on vacation last week and American Airlines mishandled my luggage both on the way to my vacation destination and on the way home. Not just a bag or two either, but all three bags we checked.

While changing planes in San Juan, Puerto Rico; American Airlines decided that since our plane was close to the weight limit to put our luggage on another flight. Not one of the next two flights to Puerta Plata, Dominican Republic mind you but to the capital, Santo Domingo. A 6-7 hours drive away. After landing on Saturday afternoon, I finally received my luggage Monday morning.

Then on the way back home, our flight from Miami to Newark gets cancelled. We get booked on a flight to JFK instead. We arrive in JFK at midnight, stand in line waiting for a voucher for a cab to take us to Newark. Go down to claim our luggage. Shocker, our 2 hour layover in Miami wasn’t enough time to move our luggage from the cancelled flight to the one we were put on. We landed at midnight Saturday night/Sunday morning. Come to find out they didn’t even bother to send the luggage to NYC until Monday. I finally got my luggage delivered to my house yesterday, complete with one empty bottle of rum that had leaked out into my clothes.

10

I may have told this story before, none-the-less, here it goes. A couple of years ago my wife and I went to France. It was a Delta/Air France thing. Des Moines to Chicago, change planes, Chicago to NY-JFK, change planes, NY to Paris, change planes, Paris to Strasbourg. As things worked out we were late getting into Paris, missed our connecting flight and had to take another. When we got to Strasbourg there was no sign of our two checked bags. As we were standing around the baggage claim generally muttering and bitching (me in bad German and Sue in much better French) we were approached by a young man in a more or less uniform who asked if we were Mr and Mrs Gelding and had we flown to Paris from Des Moines. We were then told that because we were not on the connecting flight our baggage was not boarded, that it had missed the flight we in fact took and that our stuff would be along shortly. We, he said should go on to our hotel and the bags would be sent on by taxi. He then gave us two care packages with a change of underwear, combs and brushes, a mirror, toothbrush and tooth paste, hand soap, shampoo, conditioner and, in mine, a condom, all in a compact sip-up pouch. Within a hour or two, when we came back from a walk, our luggage was at our hotel.

American and Belgium Air my well be incompetent but Air France, at least on one occasion, knew how to do things. Just the fact that the representative was pleasant and apologetic made a big difference. It was a good T-shirt and pair of boxers. No sox, however.

11

Well, the French. You know.

12

Last year my son and MIL returned from a month-long trip to England. The flight was delayed, my MIL had been up since midnight London time, and they barely made the connection in Boston, so not all their luggage showed up in Orlando.

Sensing something was wrong, I went ahead and got in the Lost Luggage Line while they were still standing by the baggage carousel. About an hour later, I’m finally next up to the counter, having stood behind the Empress of the World, who seemed to believe it was the fault of the girl behind the counter that her luggage hadn’t made it from Boston, and was bitching at her the whole time.

Taking my cue from the Empress, on my turn, I very sweetly told the clerk what had happened (by this time, my exhausted MIL had joined me, and she could not see to write her address on the claim form, she was so tired, so I filled it out for her) and we got them home. The clerk was very helpful to us, but when the Empress stuck her head in the door to ask another question, the clerk was very curt with her.

The next day, one of my MIL’s bags showed up and they delivered it. My MIL refused to sign the form that “all baggage had been delivered,” somewhat pissing off the delivery guy.

About a month later, bag number two shows up…somehow it got sent to the Dominican Republic. Apart from a couple of broken picture frames, everything was intact.

How much theft occurs at the airport, with someone grabbing a bag from the carousel in the hopes there might be goodies inside?

13

Oh man. Do not get me started on airline mishandling of luggage. Oops, too late - I’m started.

My husband and I, with our luggage, tried to travel from Valencia, Spain to Paris. You know Paris, right? Big city in France? Well, apparently Air Europa does not. Our flights (note plural; Mr. Woo was partly to blame for the initial mishandling by booking not one, not two but THREE flights from Valencia to Paris, including a scenic hop to Palma de Mallorca, but that’s another whine) were messed up by the ticket agent when we checked in to Valencia, and barely got on a flight out of Palma. We figured our luggage wouldn’t make that flight. What we did not figure is that our luggage would have a much more exciting tour of Europe than we did.

When we got to Paris and our luggage didn’t show up, we toddled over to the Air France luggage counter. Apparently Air France is the only entity who can find luggage, and as it turned out, they did. But first, our luggage went to Palermo, Sicily. Then to Barcelona. Then to Marseille. It finally turned up at our hotel at 6:00 on Tuesday night. We had arrived Saturday afternoon.

I was completely befuddled by the airlines inability to get it to us - if they knew where it was (our hotel concierge very kindly gave daily calls to Air France and Air Europa and passed on the status to us), why the bleepity bleep couldn’t they PUT IT ON A PLANE TO PARIS?? Why send it all over the Med? I’m sure there’s at least one flight a day to Paris, right? Keeripes!

Plus, when we finally got it, there were fully 8, yes, eight different tags/documents attached to each piece. The most staggeringly complex and inefficient process I think I’ve ever seen.

All I can say is I’m glad that at least I was in Paris with no clothing or cosmetics. Had to go shopping - darn!

14

Honeymoon trip - my new wife and I were going to Orlando.

Skipping the big story, read it here, here’s an excerpt:

15

Yeah, but Belrix you guys got your luggage the same day. The first day of your honeymoon, which you were going to spend naked in the hotel anyway. I’m not saying it isn’t a bad way to start your honeymoon, but in the grand scheme of things hardly earth shattering.

Try telling two little kids why they have to wait for their swimsuits to arrive before we can get into the pool. We eventually let them swim in their shorts & t shirts because I’m not some cruel monster.

16

Holy crap but this makes me bloody nervous. I’m flying to Canada next month.

17

Air Madrid lost my green and purple backpack. I’m not going to go over how much that cost me, or their behavior re. the complaint, or not being able to contact them except by walking up to their desk in Barajas (I live 500km from Madrid). But I’m going to mention the 16hr flight that turned into 23hr, in a 747 in which only 3 of the sound system plugs worked and two of the bathrooms didn’t.

Iberia, whose responsibility it wasn’t at all, but who manages luggage in Barajas, took almost a month to find it, but find it they finally did. Apparently the backpack had come off the plane during the Panama stopover and nobody there knows what “morado” means (black grape purple).

When I heard that Air Madrid was declaring bankruptcy, I cheered and did a victory dance.

18

I learned long ago not to piss off anyone working for the airline, as they all have the ability to whisk your bags to Bombay at any time.

Except, of course, if you really are going to Bombay.

19

Actually your bag fitting ire should be directed to the Belgium Government and/or the EU.

Euro politicians believe that baggage screeners are not competent enough to check more than one bag per person (it’s the first link on the right hand side).

20

I have also had a bag taken from me that was withing the airlines restrictions. The flight was 2 hours late, I think the flight attendant was in a rush to get people boarded. When I objected to having the bag taken (it had my laptop inside) his exact words were “Check your bag or don’t fly” He wasn’t nice about it. I called Southwest customer service later and gave them the dimensions, asking what I had to do to make sure that this didn’t happen again (because I never ever check my computer), the guy said that I should have been able to keep my bag with me in the first place.