Originally Posted by
nacho
Thanks for the replies! It's a A320 and more importantly it's not full (outbound was full but our bags still made it).
What made me suspicious was that the ones who don't have bags were those who travelled home, i.e. 1) no one can claim travel insurance = insurance companies can't go after BA for compensation; 2) It's easier to deliver bags to home bound passenger vs. outbound passenger especially if they are doing a 2 week road trip like we did. Both times the ones queuing at Menzies or getting the emails are those who are coming home from holiday. Another data point: when we were checking in at CPH, our layover was 1:45 but we had a "short connection" tag on and both times and they made it to LAX.
We used LHR for *A transfers (SK and UA) and we never had any problem (except once AA put us on SK flight after we landed LHR and despite I went to SK counter to make sure all our bags received our new flight information, we got 3 out of 5 bags with a layover for about 5 hours).
Menzies told me that "maybe" BA can give me a better delivery time if I'm a gold member - I don't think I ever will be if this is what we have been experiencing.
I know it's a conspiracy theory but it's difficult not to think like when this happened both times we flew BA. We are not annual flyers and we flew multi destinations with different carriers and the only time it happened during the past 10 years was a bag with car seats that was checked at odd size at CPH didn't get on the flight. LH forwarded to us within 48 hours after our arrival in the US.
It's easy to think "Why me?" but, believe me, it's not the case. BA pays an inordinate amount of money on baggage repatriation and it'd be a lot easier to sort out some of the long-standing issues (such as design features in T5 that were meant to be built when the building was going up, but that ultimately were descoped) than to give precedence to outbound passengers rather than those at the end of their journey.
As for Menzies' claim that Gold bags get repatriated quicker... I'd really like to know why on God's green Earth they are claiming that. LHR has an automated re-flight system and, having worked on its implementation many moons ago, I know it doesn't get FQTV information from the passenger's file. Nor does any Baggage Reconciliation System I've seen. You see a bag, it tells you where to send it to. It doesn't say "Oi it's a Goldie, better be quick".
Again, the arrow tag that says "Long/Short" is irrelevant. It's an extra visual recognition. The real information is stored in the baggage's data files/messages. In LHR what happens to your transfer bag is as follows:
- Arrival into LHR
- Transfer bin offloaded from airplane
- Bags are offloaded from the bin in the nearest Transfer Input Point (think a belt conveyor feeding a system)
- Bags are then taken, using "trays" travelling on rails, to T5A for screening (if the bag is on a T5-T5 journey; if it isn't it'll go through the tunnel towards T3 or other terminals)
- Once passed the appropriate screening levels, the bag can go in two places:
- If the onward flight is "open", i.e. being built (mind you, times for build are different from times for check-in), then the bag will travel to the appropriate lateral where it'll be put in the bin for the next flight
- If the flight isn't open, and on a 1h45 connection it'll most definitely not, it'll go in the Early Bag Store. Imagine something like what you have at the end of Ikea, just with bags and with cranes going up and down getting the bags. Once the flight opens and the right type of bags are called, these will go down to the lateral and will go in a bin
In this situation, the arrow tag you were given has no use whatsoever. It's used in situation like at LGW, where the planes are loose-loaded and the handler sorts bags by the aircraft side ("this bag is a transfer and goes into this cart; this bag isn't and goes there"). It's all governed by data read through barcodes, and the data is created almost automatically when you check-in.
Hope this helps and clarifies a little.