Originally Posted by kmin
My first post on FT, be kind.
Welcome to FT!
Originally Posted by kmin
What I'd like to ask, is what would be the most prudent/productive course of action for filing a complaint? Is there any chance United would somehow compensate me for its negligence and my troubles?
Compensation for baggage delays is generally very low. Even if the airline loses your bag entirely, you rarely get anywhere near the value of what you lost.
You can find contact info for United's customer service department on the united.com web site. IME, neither e-mail nor a snail mail gets a very quick response, particularly these days when they seem to be buried under a major backlog of correspondence due to all the centers that have been closed recently.
Either way, I would recommend writing up what happened as you did here and see if they'll offer you at least an apology and some token compensation. They'll probably tell you that you should have checked in earlier, but in reality, the main causes of your problem were the FA mis-tagging the bag and the baggage service people being unable to get it on a flight for 3 days. Hopefully, they'll recognize that if you write a clear, non-ranting summary of what happened as you did here.