DiverDave

I cannot recall ever having a misdirected bag. I have had bags that missed their connection, I have had bags that simply were not loaded, and I had a bag thrown onto a carousel at a connection point (SEA). In the last case, by the time the baggage crew picked it off the carousel it had missed its flight to FAI.

Back in the day, ASA was really good at leaving bags behind.

DCAFly

Yes I saw that. Did you not see or comprehend that my post was hypothetical? Though I meant to say "What if" at the start of my message ("what is" was a typo) - I was just wondering what Delta would do if someone had to go out and spend a lot of money on clothes because of the misdirected bag. You could easily rack up hundreds of dollars in justifiable costs if you were left without work clothes for a few days.

bpe

I recently flew BOS-LHR-XXX (same airline and ticket) and the agent insisted that I'd have to collect and recheck my bag at LHR, and get my next boarding pass there too as the computer wouldn't give it to her.

Turns out that she was reprinting the bag tag and boarding pass of the previous passenger, which I only noticed after she handed them to me.

jrl767

I'm not arguing the validity of your hypothetical; it just didn't seem particularly relevant to OP's stated situation

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my only similar experience was on UA -- my wife and I took an early morning LAX-SEA flight; we were attending a wedding that evening, and the checked bag with our good clothes didn't arrive ... we spent an hour or so at the downtown Nordstrom, submitted receipts for probably $250 apiece, and received a check for the full amount within a couple weeks, no questions asked

before anyone starts with the "shouldn't have checked it" lectures, the trip was about a month before we moved back to Seattle from SoCal; our carry-on allowance got eaten up by stuff that we didn't want to risk UA or movers mishandling, plus our cat that we were bringing along to leave with her parents for the interim (there's a whole 'nother story about THAT misadventure ...)
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ok, back on topic ...

HDQDD

I briefly worked for Midway Airlines (JI, the second incarnation) that was based at RDU. We had ATA do our ground handling at EWR. They also flew to Chicago MDW from EWR (see where this is going...). One night in RDU we open up a 737 from EWR and it's full of not only bags in the wrong city, but bags on the wrong airline. I suppose that conversation went something like this:

Ramp Lead to new guy: "Go get the Midway bags".
New guy to the bagroom: "Hook me up with the Midway bags".
Bags for Midway airport were given instead of Midway airlines...and nobody caught it.

Since ATA didn't even fly to RDU and JI didn't fly to MDW, we took the 737 load of MDW bags to WN. They were kind enough to put them on their next flight, and we called ATA@MDW and let them know. It's hard to believe, but stuff like this happens. Even with Tech, people still do dumb things.

joeyE

joeyE

NOLAnwGOLD

My recent LAX-AMS-CDG flight diverted over the US to ATL. I rebooked via phone as we landed ATL-CDG directly. We told the gate agent to make note of the new reservation and to pull the bags since I wasn't sure what was going to happen to the diverted original flight.

Got to CDG, no bags (AF wasn't so nice but eventually got us a claim). No info ever given, no updates on the online system. Had two nice shopping days in Paris. Bags arrived to the hotel (I kind of wanted another day of shopping LOL). Submitted the claim, got a call about 45 minutes later and they reimbursed the large claim (two people, though we did buy only onsite items at ), no questions asked. I don't think we got any miles for the lost bags (got some for the diversion, plus a ATL hotel reimbursement)

I was a little shocked that there was no info about where the bags were, since they should be scanning them at some point, like offloading at ATL, since I believe the flight got a new plane 6 hours later, and needed to reload onto another DL flight, if it just followed the original routing.