Was flying RNO-DEN-IAD on Tuesday. Got to RNO about 1 1/2 hours before departure and checked one bag. When I get to Dulles, no bag and the automated machine says my bag is delayed in transit. Ask the United baggage staff and they say that RNO rerouted my bag through LAX. No reason given. Said they would deliver it between 7am and 11am.

Next day get a call from United and they say my bag will be delivered between 9am and 1pm. Not a huge issue, but 1pm comes and goes without a delivery. Call the phone number on the claim form, ask for an agent and eventually get transferred to 1k baggage in Chicago. They first said my bag was waiting for delivery by the contract delivery service. I called the contract delivery company and they said that United only delivered the bag to them at 1pm, and it would be on the next run that would get it to me in the next 3-5 hours.

So someone is not giving me accurate information. Call back United, and they admitted that Dulles baggage folks never "transfered" my bag over to the contract delivery company for morning delivery. Said something like "the people at Dulles should give priority to 1K bags but they sometimes just let them sit there."

So it seems to me that the Dulles baggage folks need a wake up call.

Now the generic baggage problem. When I arrived in Dulles the announced baggage claim was number 4. When I got there there were some bags on the belt, and when I looked at the tags they showed the DEN-IAD flight that I arrived on. Obviously they were delivered on the earlier DEN-IAD flight. And there were another 20 bags stacked behind the belt area. Having your bags come in on an earlier flight is a good thing IF you know that it has happened. Of course no announcement was made that some bags had already arrived. I made my own announcement to the 30 people waiting for bags and about hald of them found their bag either on the belt or behind the belt area. It took another 25 minutes for the rest of the bags to come out, so I figured I saved 5 hours of United passenger wait time.

This has happened to me before both at Dulles and BWI. In every instance t baggage staff were in the office and making other announcements. How hard would it be for them to provide some customer service and inform people that some bags had already arrived. Or provide a text message system like they do for flights, alerting people to the status of their bags.