<rant>

Hello,

Recently flew my first CO flight in a long time from EWR to MAD and back. As my mother taught me to never say a bad thing about someone if you cant say something nice, I will say that the flight in BF was outstanding and I will definitely look towards using CO again the next time I have to fly to MAD. Now for the gripe...

Originally started trip from DTW to EWR, but CO cancelled flight and rebooked me on NWA. When I arrived to MAD neither myself or my brother or cousin got our bags (my borther and I had 2+ hours downtime at EWR between flights, my cousin 5+ hours!). Went to luggage desk and was told "happens all the time, must be NWAs fault". We got our luggage next day, no compensation or explanation given.

Flew back on Monday and had to fly into MAD from SCQ on IB. The IB agent checks our three bags through to EWR under my cousins ticket(she said that we needed to recheck them after customs so she couldnt check them all the way through to DTW). When I arrive in EWR, we wait an hour by the baggage carousel and no bags show up after all the bags for our flight have been run through and bags from later flights start appearing. We check with the service folks at CO and they say that we cant start a trace until we reach DTW. After we arrive at DTW we inform them of our situation, people at baggage center say "Sorry to hear of your problems, must be IBs fault". They put out a trace on the three bags and we are told it will probably be 48 hours to get the bags since they would need to fly in from Europe.

Yesterday we call CO and they say that bags arrived, they had made it to EWR on Monday but for some technical reason were not off loaded with our other bags. Bags made it to DTW by noon and were out for delivery to my cousin's house during the PM. When the baggage person came to the house no one was home, so he left one bag and left without offloading the other two. Now here's the kicker, the bag left was my brother's (with a completely different street address from my cousin's).

Planning on writing to CO to complain about baggage issues and I am looking for some ideas on what compensation to ask for. I am not Onepass (I usually fly NWA) and the odds are that I wont be flying CO soon so a voucher wont be as good. Can I ask CO for mileage credit to NWA?

Finally, the two phrases I heard during this ordeal that really backfired were "This happens all the time" (okay, so why doesnt it get fixed?) or "Its the other airline's fault" (how about saying "we will look into what happened" instead. Heard these multiple times on this trip and each time it just made my blood boil. Thanks in advance for any ideas/comments.

Jose

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