SouthWest Airlines Baggage Blunders

Today after attendance to the DEMA Show in Las Vegas I arrived well in advance for Southwest airlines 1:10 p.m. departure. After some ticket mixup rectification, the curbside checker provided me with a corrected ticket at a different curbside counter he had asked me to follow him to after originally taking my main checked bag behind his designated curbside counter.

At the secondary counter, after being handed my corrected boarding pass and baggage claim number, knowing he still hand not placed the corresponding luggage claim sticker to my checked bag back at his original counter, I asked him how my bag was going to get put on the conveyor. He replied: Don't worry, my buddy will do it and he has been working here even longer than I have."

After my arrival to LAX, my bag did not arrive. At the LAX baggage carousel, SouthWest Airlines has a baggage claim office. I informed the attendants of the problem, to which they said my bag will be on the next flight arriving shortly. I asked them to track the bar code on my luggage to find out where it was as I had no interest in waiting around on a whim. It was at that time I was shocked to hear SouthWest Airlines has bar codes on their luggage tags yet has never had the ability to read and track bar coded luggage.

I then asked the attendant how she knew my bag was on the next flight, at which point she admitted upon my rather pointed questioning that she was just guessing.

After I took her to task for guessing with a scripted claim, with another script she all too eagerly patronized me over to her supervisor whom I discovered apparently was promoted to a supervisor because she has used the script more. Almost immediately she patronized me some more and asked me if I would like to fill out a claim form. "To hell with finding my bag, I don't even need it, I just want to fill out a claim form! In fact, can I fill out a bunch of them?!" was my deadpanned reply. I then asked her how they could be so backwards and not have bar coding enabled like everyone other airline I fly on? Now get this, here came the script again: If you would like I can provide you with an address where you can write SouthWest and express your concerns". It is like they take formal courses on antagonizing passengers they've screwed over.

If ever someone can convey how they utterly did not care without ever stating such, the supervisor was a great actor.

Now of course my bag never arrived on the next flight, so a claim form was filled out. I provided a cell number, and to their credit, Now Services, the apparent courier called at 5;53 p.m. stating they had my bag, they would deliver it within several hours, and agreed to call my cell 10 minutes prior to arrival.

Also to their credit, SouthWest themselves called 14 minutes later at 6:06 p.m. stating they found my bag.

Now comes past 11 p.m. in the evening, no call, no bag, so I called the SouthWest toll free baggage info line and a very able Gary volunteered to call the LAX Southwest office which was closed, then he called Now Services, whom he stated has just a tape recording machine that said the voice mailbox was full and to call back tomorrow. I also found out not only did they never put my bag on that flight, they didn't put it on the following flight, and finally decided to put it on the 3rd flight.

So I still do not have my bag. On the basis of this, I cannot recommend flying on SouthWest Airlines, nor could I ever in good conscience recommend to equipment laden dive travelers to use an airline that does not read nor have the capability to scan and track the bar codes they print on their luggage tags.