As I have been mulling splitting up my flying between *A and oneworld and achieving Emerald status this month, the thing that kills me is the lack of a oneworld baggage policy. I have several top tier *A gold cards and a oneworld sapphire card.

I usually take extended trips or pick up things along the way and having an extra 20kg or a guaranteed extra piece removes any hassle or worry at the airport. Furthermore, its is totally uniform, never argued and a real Star Gold benefit.

I recently flew MNL/HKG on CX and got tagged for being 10kg over the limit. My BA sapphire card did nothing to help. Had I been on a Star carrier, it wouldn't have even been noticed.

Why does oneworld fail to have some sort of baggage policy for elites? I think this is horribly uncompetitive with Star Alliance and the baggage policy has actually been the decisive factor for me on ALL of my HKG/PEK flying this year, some 40,000 bucks worth, which I have put on CA.

Does anyone in this forum think its about time OW got a baggage policy together?

Is it nice to have such policy? Yes. But is that the biggest problem of OW right now? No. Not everyone travel with that much extra baggages. OW has bigger fish to fry

See this thread:

Petition for OneWorld Frequent Flyer Make Luggage Allowance a Systemwide policy

Search terms {oneworld baggage policy}

Peace.

From a customer service perspective, I can't name a single "bigger fish to fry". The lack of a common standard is in my book the single most aggravating customer-facing aspect of oneworld and a competitive disadvantage vis a vis both other alliances. YMMV.

As I said, not that many people fly with so many baggages.

From an objective point of view, the alliance as a whole needs to improve its network. It doesn't matter how many allowance you got when they don't offer the flight you want. There's a major void in China and Southeast Asia. JAL and CX/KA can't cover that efficiently. Not to mention AA can't really cover the entire N. America either. Retaining LAN is also one of their top priorities.

And if you want to focus on baggages, I would rather get priority baggages than extra allowances. That benefits way more people than just those who fly with heavy bags!

JalPak, I understand what you are saying but why don't we just make it uniform priority for all Emerald members + extra bagagge allowance. Is it really that difficult to make everyone agree to that?

20kg extra on all flights regardless of class of service where weight system applies

Priority tagging regardless of class of service.

Huge disadvantage for me with OW. Star Alliance really does make it more hassle free for gold members, priority baggage with 90% of the carriers is actually prioritized on OW and even interlining, the baggage still comes out first.

Also, not everyone can travel on 2 week trips with 30kg of baggage, especially when crossing from one hemisphere to the other. Believe, there are many people every day who travel, pay huge prices for their tickets and are skimped b/c of this stupid baggage charge.

As I said, it's nice to have such benefits but OW has bigger problems to deal with right now. Priority bags could be easily done as it almost costs the carriers nothing but extra allowance does.

JALPak, I think if there ever was a poll amongst elite level OW flyers, this baggage issue would be somewhere in the top. Allowing extra baggage should not cost the airlines very much, especially if, as you say, there are few passengers likely to avail of the extra baggage allowance. The resulting gain in goodwill might well help OW gain / retain more customers.

Your moniker suggests some kind of affinity to JL - imagine a customer faced with a choice of JL & NH on a specific route. Having a higher baggage allowance, whether one needs it or not, would surely encourage one to book NH in this scenario (considering both carriers have very similar timetables)?

There's an overhead of setting up any benefit. I simply compare that to the actual value per frequent flyer.

Imagine a customer faced with a choice of OW vs *A. *A gets you there without much backtracking while OW requires you to fly an extra 5 hours or even worse OW don't fly there? All the extra baggage allowance is pointless if you simply can't get to your destination efficiently.

Sorry I don't follow your logic here, why would that encourage someone to fly a carrier simply because of the extra allowances even though they know they won't need that If everything else is equal maybe, but in reality it's not. Services provided by JL and NH could be quite different.

By the way, there are less and less non-aligned quality airlines out there that can compliment OW's network. If OW doesn't act now to fill the void, it won't have much choices left later (unless they try to steal other carriers which is possible). It's about which one is more urgent and provide better value per passenger.

While I agree with the content of the most recent discussion, this is wrong thread for it. This thread is meant to discuss a oneworld baggage policy. There is currently another thread meant for discussing improvements that oneworld could implement:

End of 2010: How can OneWorld's network improve?

Peace.

OP asked "Does anyone in this forum think its about time OW got a baggage policy together?" This is more than just a OW baggage policy thread. It also discuss whether it should be done now. The network related issues are just one of the reasons why OW shouldn't prioritize the baggage policy over other issues

I don't see why they should. Different airlines have different allowances and baggage allowances have never been nor suggested to be anything where there is a status benefit

A uniform allowance could just lead to the lowest common denominator of 20Kg/30Kg/40Kg with excess charged per Kg for economy/business/1st rather than there be allowances where some carriers offer higher amounts

Alternatively, for uniformity, they could go for a policy of no additional allowance within a scheme and a policy to ensure that all OW cariers become uniform in collecting excess fees rather than the current case where some are less strict than others

Uniform policy would not imply that it would be better ; it ain't broke, so don't fix it imo

I argue that it is broke. I have chosen NOT to fly OW on occasion because I do not want to have to worry about whether the next OW carrier will charge me fees for baggage. That is broken IMHO because OW is losing revenue to Star Alliance. Traveling with them is much more hassle free as a gold member - I think there is no arguing with that.

A little OT here BUT recently at the CX "Cabin" lounge by gate 23 at HKG, I presented a same day RJ business class boarding pass to enter HKG/AMM. The staff took 15 minutes to determine whether or not I would be allowed into the lounge and at first told me to go away! At *A that would never happen. Any carrier's C or F class BP gets you into any C or F lounge (except the HON lounges in FRA and MUC).

Lack of uniformity across the board = broken.