Good, we seem to narrow down on just a few points (I am saying that because we typically agree on almost everything. Well, not this time, but at least we filter out what it is that separates us):
Originally Posted by
NickB
Would you mind answering the question which you have studiously avoided to answer up until now, namely:
Sorry, really not done on purpose. I just didn't see the question that way.
do you consider that what the agent did was widely out of line with what a typical check-in agent would have done (and I am happy for this to be restricted to a "European full service airline")? Is it self-evident to you that, had the agent been, say, a BA, IB, AZ, LH, SK, FI, etc... check-in agent with a similar set-up to stop oversize/overweight baggage coming though, the agent would without doubt have called to gate
I do believe indeed that it is not completely out of line. I do believe that with a passenger in front of him that is perfectly fine with checking his overweight hand luggage + the counter check in deadline over + the passenger having only one choice which is to destroy some of his personal belongings + the passenger suggesting "I am happy to hand it over at the gate if you cannot take here" - I do believe that many if not most of a check-in agent with some common sense and some "sensitivity" to customer needs would have made that call.
You think it's out of line. I think it would happen. One of us is wrong
, and we have no way of knowing (and certainly neither of us has the appetite to try it out!)
It would be a completely different story if the only way to have the passenger check his luggage at the gate would have been to something extremely cumbersome/time-consuming/hasslesome/complex, such as get written permission from a superior in the AF hierarchy, would have required an agent to go with the pax all the way to the gate, would have required AF gate agents to confiscate lugggage although they otherwise never do it, etc. But it was not that difficult. It was actually bloody simple. One phone call.
and accompanied to pax to security to ensure that the pax be allowed through?
Err, no. Did I say that I'd expect that?
But, then, what you are essentially criticising AF for is for not having above average agents that are better than the typical European full-service airline agents.
There we can agree to disagree. I do not think that it takes above average agents to understand the overall situation and to follow up on a suggestion of someone else (the agent doesn't even need to have the IQ/wherewithal/savviness/creativity to have himself the idea to let the passenger do it at the gate!)
If that is what you are criticising AF for, then fine. You can make that criticism if you wish. I would disagree with you because I find that it is not a reasonable standard to expect but we would be clear as to what exactly our disagreement is.
We are
Had I been in the OP's shoes and an agent had done what she suggested (called the gate, accompanied me through security, etc...), I would have been well-chuffed and very grateful to the agent.
Absolutely!! And don't get me wrong: I do not suggest that this kind of thing should be standard procedure. All I am saying is that no harm would have been done and no superhuman effort would have been required to find a pragmatic solution. But certainly for the customer something the marketing people call "moment of gratitude" (customer realises he has a real problem but company/agent does something extra to fix that problem. Increases that customer's loyalty).
This is not standard behaviour that I would have expected from the agent. To put it in a BA frame, that would have been something worthy of a "golden ticket".
Yep.
What does this signify? It signifies that this is not the typical standard that I expect from agents (otherwise why would I be grateful for agents for just doing their job?) but is above and beyond. I do not think that it is a reasonable criticism to target at an airline that all of its agents are not routinely going above and beyond.
Well, except that in this case (i) it was even suggested by the pax, so no need for the agent to even come up with the idea and (ii) the choice was between something radically bad (somebody having to throw away personal items, which as I explained I personally find very serious) and something very easy to do to avoid it.
There is a major difference between being disappointed that an agent did not go above and beyond what a typical agent would do and criticising the airline for being "unfair" because its agents are not outstanding agents.
I am not criticizing the agents to be unfair. Nor do I criticize them not to be outstanding. I criticized them for not doing something easy and pragmatic in the face of a situation which is dramatic for one of its customers.
The OP's luggage was not 500g or 1kg above. It was 19kg, 7 kg above the weight limit. I think that, again, this is a disingenuous argument. I do not think that it is likely that the OP told herself that her hand luggage was probably no more than 12kg.
As I said, I am not going into that part of the argument. I don't know what the OP thought or assumed (and I take the liberty to presume that you do neither?).
But the point I made is independent of this particular Dakar tale. I made that point to demonstrate that in general people who have overweight hand luggage are not necessarily aware of it or think "I am doing something I shouldn't be doing and I hope or will try to get around the rule". Many many (most?) people simply have no means to determine the weight of their hand luggage and are perfectly good-willed and also have no issue whatsoever to check it when the airline asks them to do so.
Maybe here is another difference we have: you
seem to - and please correctly if I misunderstood you - to assume that everybody with overweight hand luggage is a cheater who tries to get around the rules. I believe that people are just naive or bad at estimating the weight of their hand luggage.
It seems to me infinitely more likely that the OP simply did not bother estimating the weight of her hand luggage and merely assumed that she could simply ignore the weight limits and bring it onboard regardless of weight.
Maybe. Maybe not. I'll let you speculate, but I won't because I have absolutely zero facts that would allow me to make any hypothesis whatsoever about what Dakar traveler thought or assumed or believed or estimated as weight or..... As I said, I'll step away from that part of the discussion.
More generally, I do not believe that those of us who travel around with 19kg in hand baggage actually believe that the weight of our luggage is below 12kg. I think that most of us know that it is likely to be above that level but make a deliberate choice to carry it nonetheless.
I think the opposite. But we have no way of telling.
I would have some sympathy with your argument in relation to a zealous agent making a fuss for a bag which is just above the limit. But this is not what we are talking about here.
But you're again bringing this back to an argument about whether AF staff should have allowed the Dakar traveler through with his overweight hand luggage. Nobody says that the agents were overzealous by not letting someone through with 7 kgs of overweight hand luggage. And I certainly never criticized them for not allowing that.
Besides, if someone was genuinely in doubt as to how whether their hand baggage is within limits or not, there is a very easy way to check: just go to the check-in desk and they will be more than happy to weigh it for you.
But that is precisely the point: *if* someone is in doubt. My point was that many people are not, and the Dakar Traveler apparently wasn't either. What was it that should have led him to doubt?
It is a different discussion whether the Dakar traveler *should* have been in doubt given that 7kgs is quite a lot of difference. But there again, I won't participate in the debate if he was naive, can't do realistic estimates of weight ,or whatever. I can't be in his mind and debate that.
Well, that depends on what one means by "not causing a problem". It is a reasonable inference to draw that, if I have never been stopped before, then the odds of being stopped are probabl lower than otherwise. But this is similar to: I have never been caught speeding on this road before, therefore the odds of being caught speeding are low. What this does not allow you to conclude is that the speed limit is higher than the speed you were driving at.
Not my point, not at all actually. The way you write it I agree (see one of the first things I mention that we agree on in my previous post).
In your speeding example i) there is certainty, because the driver *knows* his speed (it's right in front of him) ii) hence the driver *knows* that he is breaking a rule shouldn't and hopes to get away with it (=bad intention). In the hand luggage example, i) for practical purposes a traveler often does *not know* the weight of his hand luggage, hence there is no certainty ii) and therefore a traveler does not base his assessment of whether he'll be stopped solely on only one indicator but several iii) historical evidence is just one of them, where historical evidence *could* mean that the hand luggage in the past was indeed within limits iv) traveler is not aware that he may be breaking a rule v) has no intention to break the rule and is happy to fix the "breaking the rule" attempt by checking the overweight piece of luggage.
Why compare someone who has the intention and is aware that he is breaking the rule with someone who does not have that intention and does not know whether he is?
If your baggage had been regularly weighed on previous occasions and each time you were within the weight limits, and the baggage seems more or less the same to you, then I agree that you could make an inference that your baggage is probably within limits. If you have not been stopped before to have your hand luggage weighed, you simply cannot conclude from this that your luggage is within limits. It merely tells you that the odds of being caught are low. That is not at all the same thing.
Exactly. But "the odds are low" based not only on historical evidence but also on other factors is what drives someone to believe that he is within the limits.
This was in answer to your statement that "I certainly never argued that rules should be bent." It seems to me that you are doing precisely that here: you are expecting rules on checking baggage at the desk by the check-in deadline to be waived and the passenger being allowed to check luggage at the gate instead.
Sorry, I don't get that one. Where is the rule that hand luggage can only be checked at the counter? Why then does Air France confiscate hand luggage at the gate (and often even on board) all the time? Typically these are items where passengers - reasonably or not - believe that they are OK as hand luggage but the airline does not. We are not talking about luggage that is hold luggage anyway for its size which indeed can/should only be checked at the counter before the check-in deadline.
Besides, on the wider point, of course they CAN do it. AF CAN hold a plane for late coming passengers. An airline agent CAN use her own money to buy a ticket for a passenger, Air France CAN under certain circumstances issue passes allowing individuals who do not fly to go airside, Af CAN decide to schedule an extra flight, etc...
One can destroy any argument by taking it ad absurdum. Of course Air France can do plenty of things, many of which are extremely distant from what it does every day and for which procedures are established and/or which have massive financial consequences for the airline. I am talking about confiscating hand luggage at the gate, which happens *every day* maybe several hundred times. So it is not that they have to invent it for this passenger, they only have to apply to this one passenger the same procedure they apply to others.
it does not follow that you have a reasonable entitlement or expectation for this to happen. Just because something is physically possible does not mean that it I can have a reasonable expectation that it will be done.
Again, you are arguing on something I never said. I never said that one should expect something only because it's physically possible. That is of course unrealistic. See my previous paragraph, it is not unreasonable to expect that a procedure that is applied to many other passengers to also be applied to one more.
Speed cameras on this stretch of empty road are highly uncommon. Mobile controls are normally carried out at the entrance to the village, ergo I have a legitimate complaint if a mobile camera catches me speeding in this empty road stretch?
Huh?
Again, you are taking the example of speeding where someone knows that he is breaking the rule and tries to get away with it. Which has nothing to do with this case. The rest I don't understand.
It is true that, in the majority of cases, ignoring the rules on maximum weight for baggage will have little or no impact on the passenger concerned. This is part of the calculations some of us make to take the risk to ignore them. But it does not follow from this that we have an entitlement to be spared from the unanticipated consequences of or decision to take the risk to ignore them. That is our problem if we do that and it is not appropriate for us to attempt to blame the airline for the consequences of our choice to ignore the rule, even where those consequences are unanticipated due to our assumptions at to how the rule will be enforced.
AF makes no representation whatsoever as to their processes for enforcing the rule. If you want to make assumptions about this based on your past experience, fine. But these are YOUR assumptions, not representations made by AF.
AF is very clear as to what they expect you to do if you have luggage that exceeds hand luggage allowance: you are told that you have to go to a check-in desk before the check-in deadline and check it. You don't want to do it and want to risk it? Fine but that is your problem if things then go pear-shaped due to your own choices.
Again, I don't get that (and I don't blame you for that, I suppose it's me).
Just that one bit:
AF is very clear as to what they expect you to do if you have luggage that exceeds hand luggage allowance: you are told that you have to go to a check-in desk before the check-in deadline and check it.
AF is very clear about what they expect? Where am I being told what they expect?
At the airport, fine, but not before, I just checked their website and my last e-ticket. So what means do I have as a passenger to know how their setup works and what they expect? None (other than this site, but Air France cannot rely on FlyerTalk to be the source of information for passenger who have the wherewithal to ask themselves the question whether Air France could possibly be one of the few airlines or possibly the only one that at one of its airports checks the weight of hand luggage at security and not at the gate). Hence, since I am not being told before and I cannot find out from the airline even if I proactively search that info, I go by assumptions/probability. And that leads me to expect that this kind of checking happens at the gate.
In the end, I have no issues with rules being enforced but I remain very critical about the setup that Air France has chosen at CDG2 and their lack of common sense/customer friendliness/<whatever word people want to fill in without misinterpreting me> when passengers without bad intentions are squeezed by it. They could just do what other airlines and airports do and there wouldn't be problems like this.
PS: and please, do not turn around my arguments as if I was arguing for cheaters to be allowed to cheat. I am not.