So I'm definitely not hearing anyone say that Club Baggage is supposed to have actual priority handling (still less that it works in practice).

The good news, I suppose, is that it means I wasn't imagining things.

But it's disappointing: I assumed that the modern baggage systems would be able to put such a priority into practice.

I just had a look on ba.com and I didn't find any claim of priority handling for club class bags. So perhaps that has never been the case ?

I had one very good experience with tagging this week: flying back from the USA in Club but with Gold Card they applied the yellow First tags, and when I arrived at the T3 carousel, all those bags had already been removed from the carousel and put aside ... saving me a few minutes...

Qatar is the one airline where I've consistently seen the Priority tags making a difference when flying back to the US. My luggage is always on the carousel by the time I clear immigration.

Qatar handling in India, on the other hand, is inconsistent, to say the least.

Remember, though, that that depends as much on the destination ground crew as it does on the tagging, sorting and loading.