Originally Posted by
LeonS
*Question: is this normal? There have been instances in the past with other airlines, where I was able to check in my luggage only to my layover airport to access it during a long layover. It had not even occurred to me that this could be an issue. I asked the Air France rep I spoke to here in CDG if it's normal that Swissport in Seattle would refuse to do this for me, and she didn't know the answer to do and whether that's Air France policy at all airports across the world. I get that an airline might try to curb this to avoid hidden-city itineraries, but in this case it was so obvious that it was not what I was trying to do...
if you had a night in paris between your arrival and departure on the next day it would not have been a problem to short check the bags. air france does charge a hefty fee to retrieve bags mid journey. it has been like that since a couple of years, the price recently increased from 250€ to the price you mentioned.
external agents at the airport have very little rights and permissions to fulfill special requests - often they are poorly trained (I just had one agent who asked me "what is a frequent flyer number" when i asked her to change it at check-in) and can just perform standard tasks that they were trained on.
short checking bags without a valid reason (e.g. overnight at the transit airport) won't be done (for free) by any airline - except you have an extremely service oriented agent with speicial permissions.
also modifying reward tickets is not possible according to flying blue terns&conditions. when you voluntatily want to make a change you have to cancel the ticket and rebook - (no exceptions).