Originally Posted by
missamo80
There's a barcode on the bag, and the barcode is attached to my reservation, which has my status on it. Each bag gets scanned multiple times on the way to the plane. There's no need for an actual "VIP" tag to get added if an airline is willing to invest the dev time to build it properly.
Of course, this requires IT work. It's clearly not something Alaska thinks is a priority, so it'll never happen.
It goes way beyond AS investing in their IT. The entire baggage handling system would need to be reprogrammed to sort the bags by priority. If each flight requires two chutes to keep them seperate then only half the flights can be accommodated. A baggage handler isn't going to look at each barcode separately to determine which is a "VIP" tagged bag and which isn't. If it was such an easy solution, all the major airlines wouldn't still be adding priority tags manually. Priority handling of baggage is a manual process!
James