Something new for me (MM, flying UA since 1994). I checked in online yesterday and for once we have two bags. The website asks me about checked bags and wants to know if they are standard weight or overweight or oversized. One of them is biggish and heavy, the other one is smallish. So I picked one > 50 lbs (no extra cost for me) and one normal.

Today at the airport I printed the bag tags and tagged the two bags. The gate agent looks at the bigger bag, then at the scale, and then says something like “That bag isn’t heavy”. I look at the scale and it was showing 44 lbs, so I shrug and say “feels heavy to me”. She says “the tag shows it’s heavy, so now I have to retag it”. And proceeds to type away for a few minutes and then prints out a new tag and removes the old one.

So… out of curiosity, why does it matter? Are they doing their weight and balance calcs based on the number of regular and heavy bags? And if so, why is it not enough to just update the bag record in the computer and leave the bar code alone?

It almost would have been faster to move seven pounds of crap from the smaller to the larger bag