Originally Posted by
YVR72
I just had a fascinating and positive experience with priority baggage.
I was flying Montreal to Vancouver, with a connection in Toronto. I checked a bag in Montreal, through to Vancouver
I was in J, so was one of the first few off the aircraft. When I arrived at the carousel, it was turning slowly with a handful bags on it bunched together.
One of them was mine! The tag was marked “Expedited Baggage”.
They had put it on a direct YUL-YVR flight and it had arrived 45 minutes before me via AC 307.
Plus, they had moved it to the correct baggage carousel too.
I believe it was an automated process because the tag still had the “Priority” flag on it that was attached in Montreal. Correction - the “expedited” sticker was applied to the baggage tag after it left check-in.
Anyway, I was delighted as I really didn’t want to wait around. The process was as quick as if I had carried it on.
An expedite overlay, or “rush tag” in industry parlance, is used when the bag has become decoupled from the passenger’s actual flight itinerary, allowing the airline to “rush” the bag to it’s final destination without the need for route matching or reconciliation on the first available flight or set of flights (FIRAV).
It is manually applied by a member of staff and creates a corresponding “Forwarding Message” in WorldTracer so the passenger should (theoretically) be paged at baggage claim and advised of the (usually) bad news posthaste.
In your case, the bag missed the YUL-YYZ for some reason and YULAC rushed it to YVR FIRAV… as luck would have it, the nonstop flight beat your connecting itinerary. A bit of good luck there to be sure and a nice recovery by YULAC.