My question to the OP is: If you had so many valuable recordings and HDDs on your carryon luggage, why didnt you just take the stuff out that could get lost and not recovered and checked in the rest of your camera stuff which as you stated is apparently insured by "the best insurance money can buy" ?!
Thanks for your comments. That's exactly what I did - but to do it, I had to buy another carry-on and repack my stuff. I couldn't do that with no extra luggage to put it in at the gate. It was all small pieces in a carry-on bag.
So what I am saying is that the OP probably overreacted and there could have been an easier way to fix the problem at the gate by just taking with on board the 2/3 valuable Harddrives you described together with the laptop - that wouldnt have been too hard to carry, right?!
Well, 2 (small but expensive) HD cameras, 2 external hard drives, a laptop, and iPad, a lot of small but valuable "gadgets" used for shooting and editing with nothing else than ON carry-on bag and a laptop bag... which ones do you choose? I couldn't make that choice at the gate while the crowd was already boarding.
Maybe I overreacted. I own a service business myself and I would immediately, without a second thought, fire an employee who treated a paying customer like that. Being on the other side of the equation on a daily basis, I always work to keep my own company's standards high and this is part of the reason I was in complete disbelief when I saw someone frontline, hired to deal with customers treat us like this. Not acceptable to me. To those of you on this forum who think this is "acceptable" behavior, maybe experiencing such a thing yourself will wake you up. It doesn't have to be the size or weight of your carry-on - what if you carefully picked your seats for you and your wife on your honeymoon trip and then your boarding pass shows 37C and 41E? How would you like a gate agent to deal with that? Tell you that it's "though, you can sit there or not fly?". It is the ATTITUDE this whole story is all about, not splitting hairs about who was right.
Originally Posted by
caspritz78
Still there is one little thing (has nothing to do with your post, it is more a general thing) that I don't like about this flaming posts the way the OP did. They often have this underlying implementation that because the airline supposedly treated one person unfair we all have now to stay away from this airline and if we don't we are part of a large conspiracy against this one person.
Lol, I see no conspiracy here. And I agree - I don't like posts that say "Beware..." "Don't use..." because you don't need to try to think or make decisions for others, they can do it for themselves. It's usually one person's bad experience. I tried to state my own story as it happened and didn't try to encourage anyone to stay away from LH because of MY experience - I think that would be silly. Everyone should make up his/her own mind about a company. I "contributed" my experience as raw material, but I wasn't particularly trying to influence anyone with it. Probably the biggest reason for posting it (I have to admit) was to try to "get even" with them. They treated me in a way that was unacceptable for me, I posted the story here as a matter of public record. If you are happy with LH, good for you. It is a big world with a lot of options.
Originally Posted by
Van_Looy
LOL, this is hilarious! My wife mentioned on the way home that it is especially ridiculous as we are both pretty skinny (less than 130 pounds each) and some pax are heavier than we would be with our checked in luggage attached to us :-) Let me try this next time :-) May look suspicious taking off from Hawaii or FL, but they can't say anything, can they? :-) It is not against the rules to have "some stuff" in your pockets. :-)