Yesterday I flew ARN-CPH-LIS, both legs on SK. I checked in 2 suitcases at the self-serve bag drop-off area at ARN. The bag scanner accepted my bags without problem.
At ARN, upon boarding at the gate, the boarding pass scanner beeped and lit red. The agent asked if I had checked in any bags, and I said yes, two. She pressed a bunch of keys on the computer and then said I could board. Same exact thing happened at CPH. He typed on the computer and said I could board. I asked if there was a problem and he said no and waved me in.
Upon arrival in LIS, my bags were among the last to appear on the carousal. One (but not both) of my bags was tagged "Standby" and had something written on it ("c/o dk"? "% ok"?).
(I blurred out the barcodes and bag number… of course they were normal
I noticed at least one other person got a "Standby" tag on his bag, too, so it wasn't just me.
I'm curious what happened. I was NOT flying standby, I had more than 2 hours of connection time at CPH, the flights didn't seem fully booked (I had an empty seat next to myself on CPH-LIS), my bags were perfectly normal (in terms of weight and size and contents). Aside from the problems at boarding and the "Standby" tag on one (but not both) of my bags, I had a pretty uneventful and routine journey.
The only other "abnormal" thing I can think of is that I fly the first half of the round-trip ticket (LIS-ARN) as EBS and the second half (ARN-CPH-LIS) as EBG, but neither the ticket number nor my EB number (aside from the letter prefix) changed. I can't imagine that this would have caused the problem.
I mean, in the end, I got my bags, everything turned out fine. I'm just curious what happened here. Does anyone have any ideas? I asked a friend who works in ground services at another airport and he couldn't explain it. He said he had never seen a standby tag marked like that.