feysul

I just arrived from FLL today. i checked in my luggage about 2 hours before the flight at the SWA ticket counter.

I arrived at MDW and no luggage. I fileed the claim and am waiting.

My question to all is: Does anyone have suggestions or ideas on what we should do?

The luggage had an expensive purse and a couple pair of expensive sunglasses.

DOes SWA reimburse these items? Any suggestions on what we should be doing from now to prepare in case the bag is lost???

Everyones help is apprecitated.

photomikey

It usually shows up on the next flight. The airline will typically courier it out to me, or for a few thousand points I can come and get it myself. I'm a tightwad and I typically come get it myself.

I fly with mission-critical equipment and cannot afford to be without it, so I usually fly in the day before, or at a minimum, 2-3 flights before. I (knock wood) have never had luggage so lost it didn't get to where I was before I needed it. It has been decades since I lost a bag that was never recovered.

Seat13c

Most people have their bags back with in 24 hours. Only things that are usually not covered in bag are but not limited to electronics, cash, and jewelry (mentioned in the contract of carriage). The high end stuff like the sunglasses and hand bags usually would need original receipts. Also, local office usually has 5 days to find bag before the claims department would start working on your case.

darthbimmer

Like others said, usually a missing bag arrives on a later flight. That's because the most likely reason for the delay is that baggage handling was running slow or there was a minor goof in handling your bag, like it fell off a conveyor belt or baggage cart and wasn't recovered until too late to make your flight.

On occasion a bag gets badly mis-handled, and getting it to the right place can take days. That happened to one of my bags a few years ago. The routing tag got torn off during handling. Southwest sent it to a lost bag center in Florida and only there figured out it was mine and how to get it to me.

Note that Southwest's policy for reimbursing a bag as lost requires you wait five days before making a claim.

During the interim you may be able to get compensation for ordinary items you buy to make do while waiting for the bag. For example, if your clothes were in the bag, you could (and should!) request reimbursement for buying a new set of clothes to wear. But be ready for Southwest to give you a hard time about this, even if you're only asking for reimbursement for inexpensive items such as a package of underwear and socks at discount store prices. When it happened to me, they were like, "Well can't you wash the clothes you're wearing and wear them again?"

NextTrip

Please let us know what happened.

Often1

This is the one situation where WN's lack of interline agreements works to your advantage. Unless the bag has been stolen or destroyed, it is somewhere in the WN system and will show up in due course.

If the bag is lost, you will be reimbursed for the fair market value (not replacement cost) up to a limit. Expensive items will require receipts.

Double check that your travel insurance does not require notice in a short period of time. If so, file the notice even though it is not yet time for a claim.

PAX62

WN is one of the better when it comes to reuniting luggage. Unless it was stolen or BOTH the luggage tag AND your name tag (hence the importance of a permanent type ID tag), it will show up eventually.

the 1-800 number is useless for this however. Get the direct local number at the baggage office where you arrived and check in periodically for updates.

Hot Pocket

I always check a bag and this happens to me about once per year over 100 segments.

Like others have stated, if there is another flight to your destination that day, there is a high likelihood your bag will be on it and can be delivered to your home/hotel within a couple hours.

In 20+ years of frequent WN travel they have never lost my bag. Good luck.

m907

Southwest has apparently lost my bag and it's been more than 24 hours. They say it was scanned at the destination airport, and one of my bags made it, but there has been no sign of the other.

I had to buy new clothes to attend a work event. They have told me to keep my receipts and they will "work on" reimbursing me for them. I have asked and nobody will tell me what the amount of the reimbursement will be, either for the new clothes or the lost luggage.

I booked the flight with a Visa Infinite, which provides supplementary coverage, but the terms are vague.

Does anyone have any recent experience with lost baggage on Southwest?

smmrfld

IME it’s unlikely that the bag will stay lost. Sometimes they turn up a few days later, but I’ve never had one go permanently missing.

dlaue

I have been traveling by air since 1955. Hundreds or perhaps thousands of flights. Only had my luggage completely disappear one time and I believe it was stolen in LAX by a baggage handler during a connection from HNL to LAS. It was Christmas time and the bag was 70 lbs. (the limit then) of dirty clothes and Christmas presents.

As others have noted, Southwest is quite good about delivering wayward luggage.

kennycrudup

Yeah. I've checked bagS probably 90% of the time over these last active 12 years of flying WN, a lot of that bi-weekly for years (literally several hundreds of times), and even with some of it severely late-checked, they've never outright LOST a bag.

storewanderer

Had a flight this week that was delayed 20-30 minutes due to "trying to balance the luggage counts" or some such language according to the pilot.

I was watching outside. They unloaded all of the luggage after they loaded it, messed around some more, maybe counting bags, then after that they re-loaded all of the bags and we took off. It did not appear that any new bags were brought in during that point, nor did it appear any bags were removed.

Have always had good luck with Southwest with luggage. No lost bags personally but others I've known, their luggage has always been found. It does sometimes take a few days; one person exaggerated the value of what was in her suitcase expecting a big check so she could go re-buy everything; they gave her like $100 or some small amount, then 3-4 days later they found her bag and there was some back and forth if it was really the same bag as the contents did not quite match what she had said were in the bag. You know, saying something like you had a $200 designer jeans in the bag when you really had a $15 pair of jeans from Wal Mart in the bag. Moral of the story is don't exaggerate what is in your luggage if it is lost. Southwest tends to be very honest with customers and it should be a two way street. I was very disgusted by that situation (not on the part of Southwest).

m907

Obviously the vast majority of bags get delivered just fine. I am trying to figure out what the protocol is when they don't, and nobody at Southwest will give me a straight answer.

twitch76

Unfortunately, the very small sample space of anecdotes you might gather on FT would be no more helpful “or straight” than the answers (or lack thereof) from Southwest.