Originally Posted by
Baze
Before everybody gets too upset, even the OP was asking for someone in CO to verify the information. This is only one person who talked to a Service Director at DEN. Nothing is verified.... If it is statistically the same as UA's then what's the big deal. If it is really worse than UA and this information is correct then it is a big deal and should be looked at. But let’s not jump to conclusions without facts.
Agreed....one point of information which needs to be confirmed by others.
I think the information needed to decide if this is that big of a deal is both the delayed bag rate (which I think is public information) as well as the length of time to resolve delayed bags. My hypothesis would be that the lost/delayed bag rate is could be the same but with a tracking system UA could do a better job at resolving issues. In fact, I've waited at airports before when an agent can confirm my bag is on a flight that is arriving soon (due to a scan when it was loaded). Without this information I would be unlikely to wait around and it could be hours before it is delivered.
I also think UA can attach messages to individual bag tags so when they are scanned they can be rerouted from wherever they are. I am not sure if CO can do this if their process has less scanning. A good example here is recently when flying XXX-FRA-SFO-SBA my bag missed the FRA-SFO flight. I was only in SBA for a morning meeting and was then headed back to BOS. My bag was routed to BOS from FRA (according to the new tag FRA-IAD-BOS) and was waiting for me vs. chasing me to SBA and back.
I think this is another example of pure customer service systems. I don’t know if it saves UA any money and obviously cost more (programing, scanning hardware, and additional labor to scan) but increases their customer service. My (somewhat uninformed) sense is the new UA is doing a lot more cost/financial benefit analysis which may make some of the UA features miss the cut.