Baggage Sent To Wrong Airport
 

Monday morning on my MSP -> SEA -> SMF Delta decided to send my bag to Medford, Oregon instead of coming with me to SMF. We had an MX delay, then an aircraft and gate change in SEA so I'm assuming that had something to do with it. Sill curious as to why DL's scanners let them load the bag onto the wrong flight. Unless for some reason they chucked the bag onto the plane without scanning it and scanned it on arrival. No idea how their system works, so just pure speculation.

Once I got to SMF, the baggage office was very helpful and did all of the legwork on setting up the claim and talking to the DL people in Oregon. Interestingly, she mentioned that DL prefers that people don't use Twitter so they can keep their numbers looking good when we were talking about SkyPeso compensation (from my experience, Twitter can give out way more miles than airport folks, so I always ask how much they are allowed to give out).

Without a bag I had to go buy some new clothes for a day or two. Spent about $100. My bag arrived this morning and was delivered right to my hotel. I then filled out the expense reimbursement and received an email from DL about 20 mins later saying the check was in the mail, no questions asked! They did ask what my status was so I'm guessing I had some sort of priority. Unfortunately Twitter DL didn't fulfill my request for 50k miles, but I did end up getting 10k in the end.

Overall a pretty painless process and as a bonus I got 10k miles and some free clothes! Good job DL!

:rolleyes: gotta say that was a pretty audacious request ... imo10k + reimbursement of actuals is reasonable for a 48-hr separation

Doesn't matter what you ask for. DL does this on a formulaic basis. This will be 5-10K.

In addition, DL will cover your reasonable out of pocket expenses and reserves the right to see the receipts. Best practice for quick reimbursement is to submit the receipts with the claim. $100 for 2 days is pretty reasonable, so not likely much to be worried about.

Bags sometimes go missing. As you can see, they almost always are located and reunited with the owner in 2-3 days. No system is perfect.

The Twitter thing is b.s. DOT requires reports from carriers and your bag will be reported as a statistic.

Hypothetically, could you get an extra 2500 miles in addition to the 10k by filling out an (automated) bags-on-time request?

Oh I definitely agree...just thought I would try my luck! :D

SMF looks very similar MFR if you give it a quick glance or don't know the airport codes. They had to have manually transferred the bag and bypassed or ignored most of the automation and checks.

I was once flying LAX-PDX and the check-in agent tagged my bag to PHX. I caught it before it rolled down the belt and out of sight.

How is that even possible in this day and age? Wouldn't the baggage tag be linked to your reservation? I don't check bags so I guess I don't really know the process - I assume they verify your (ticketed) reservation before taking the bag, right?

What is one is traveling on a Sunday and gets stranded without clothing before a business meeting. During the next 48 hours he or she had to buy two new suits, shoes, belts, ties, etc. That could easily be more than $500. Do you think Delta would reimburse that? I'm not talking about using it as an opportunity to go out and buy some Armani suits, but even your low end Jo. Bank suits are going to run 250-300. Two of those, $100 for a pair of shoes, and so on and so forth...

I would not test this. There are all manner of examples out there, but they tend to focus in on high status + D1.

Not only because bags going missing, but as a general proposition, given generous carry-on allowances, I would always travel with the first 2-3 days of clothing (many travel for a week) in carry-on. It seems reasonable for the reimbursement to take into account a passenger's common sense too.

My last misdirected bag was before scanning - my bag to LIM (Lima) went to ILM (Wilmington). Was tagged correctly. Arrived on the next night's flight and was at my hotel when I woke up.
I did get an upgrade to business class on the flight. Maybe that's why the bag was sent to