Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan - Military benefits on Alaska vs. American

With all of the chipping that has occurred recently, when I heard a few fellow travelers complaining about an airline while I was in the ANC military lounge, I assumed it was Alaska. I asked what their problem was, and it is that they booked their itinerary through American from Philly to ANC in order to use the free checked bags for military-ID holders benefit that American offers. On their way to ANC, they had free bags. On the way home from ANC (now), Alaska charged for their bags because they are not on orders. They are upset because it is an American benefit that they thought they had.

But I digress...because I had a few spare day passes, I gave them two day passes for the boardroom to use in Anchorage and then Seattle. I would have thought they'd leave and go take advantage of the boardroom, but they did not. Instead I have the pleasure of hearing complaints about baggage check fees and overage fees and how Alaska sucks.

Wirelessly posted (beckoa's PWP wondrousdevice3.0: Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9810; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.11+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0.0.583 Mobile Safari/534.11+)

Guess they were dependents?

http://www.alaskaair.com/content/travel-info/policies/baggage-checked.aspx


Active Duty U.S. military personnel with IDUp to 5 Bags Free.
$50 for each additional bag.
U.S. military dependents with ID and travel ordersUp to 5 Bags Free.
$50 for each additional bag.


Wonder how many bags they were trying to check?

No, they were on personal travel. Husband and wife. Husband in military. No orders. What I find silliest of all is that they booked through American to avoid the bag fees when they should have gone with Alaska and done the double miles promotion. Between the two of them, they would have racked up enough miles for a free one way. That's better than checked bags. I know how much they spent and it was more than the sale fare for the intro fares for Philly when the city was rolled out. I asked why they didn't book through alaska for the promo and I was told they booked before the announcement. Personally, I would have eaten the change fee (if I were w/o status as they are) to get the miles.

Looking at the link, it would appear to me that the active duty military ID holder does not need to be traveling on orders---just the dependents. If this is the case, then I believe they may be owed some money. I know this individual posted on the Alaska Air Facebook page about this and was told they must be on orders.

UPDATE: per the facebook thread on Alaska Air's page, it appears customer service at the airport committed an error. The couple tried to check three bags total. The husband, who is active duty but on personal travel, is allowed up to 5 bags. The agent charged them because they said he must be on orders.

Alaska resolved the issue after realizing that their agent was uninformed of the correct policy.