Originally Posted by
irishguy28
Instead - meaning you were originally supposed to fly?
I don't fully understand what happened here. You say that, in the lounge, they took your boarding pass and luggage receipt. That means your bag was already tagged (it appears, to your final destination BRU) and merely taking away your luggage receipt doesn't change that. Retrieving the checked baggage item that was already into the system, and re-tagging it, would be necessary if they discovered that they had (somehow) tagged it incorrectly.
Just for the avoidance of all doubt, if your travel includes train (or bus) sectors onwards from AMS, then you must always collect your luggage at AMS; intermodal journeys require the passenger to retrieve luggage before changing to the new mode of transport.
If you were actually supposed to fly, I'd love to know why you instead took the train! (Skipping a flight sector would have led to the cancellation of any further sectors, if there were any!)
Thanks. Indeed, I had 3 consecutive flights all the way to Brussels on a single Garuda ticket. The trip/ticket actually started in Palembang. There, my bag was tagged for Brussels and a luggage tag was stuck to my boarding pass. Someone identifying himself as a checkin agent came into the lounge 30 mins or so later to take them away and replace them with new ones, saying I had to collect my luggage in AMS. I handed them over but then slighty hesitated and asked why. For a brief moment, we were actually tugging both on the boarding passes. Of course I let go, even though no explanation was given and I felt quite insecure about the whole thing (even wondering who this person actually was). I suppose they had by then also retrieved and retagged my bag. The whole trip was jinxed it seems. Due to a severe delay of the PLM-CGK flight I had to make the connection to the CGK-AMS flight in about half an hour - security, immigration etc plus what felt like more than a km flat out running through various sections of CGK. I made it when the gate was about to close.
AMS-BRU was the final leg. I skipped the flight in AMS because of the 5h50 layover. In AMS I ran (again flat out) to the domestic KLM checkin with my luggage, hoping to catch the earlier flight to Brussels (there was one around 9h, i.e. 1h after the Garuda flight landed). But since my luggage was by far the last to arrive on the belt (another weirdness given the ticket class) and KLM domestic is at completely the other side of my GA arrival, I missed the cutoff by about 5-10 mins. I contemplated a bit my options but figured a Thalys would get me home a few hours quicker in quiet comfort, so I bought a train ticket. Then just to be nice, I rang the Garuda helpdesk to tell them they could vacate the AMS-BRU business class seat. They said I'd have to ring KLM.. I left it at that.