shuuy

Has anyone seen this feature work on the UA site for *A Airlines? My multi airline flight said it was “offloaded” at the point between UA and *A carriers... so curious if it will show up on the other side of the world

lincolnjkc

I don't believe UA has visibility into baggage movements on other airlines (or if they do they aren't licensed to publically display that data -- though I'm going with the former), however, they do appear to know the tag exists -- going UA -> OAL I've never seen anything past the last UA scan (offloaded from inbound) showing up in the app. On the other hand, going OAL -> UA, the app shows that the tag exists but doesn't show any activity on the tag (other than, IIRC, the fact that the tag was generated) until the first UA scan.

rmadisonwi

Correct. When I was trying to track a delayed bag between UA and LH, the UA agent I spoke with said he could only see that the bag got to FRA, but could not track the bag past that point.

uastarflyer

mander

I don't check bags on business trips but on vacations I often do. I have used the baggage tracker in the UA app before and found it useful and accurate. On our most recent vacation the app presented wrong information both ways.

For example yesterday it said our bags were unloaded from our IAD-TYS flight at 1035am which was correct and our final destination. But then it went on to say that they have been rerrouted and will be transferred to Knoxville (TYS). It then showed they had arrived at 1123 in IAD, which was totally incorrect.

Has the app gotten buggy? Was it perhaps that we had interlined from Hawaiian at the start of the trip back to TYS?

elynchking

lincolnjkc

Did your bag come out at customs? Whops. Misread that as BRU-DEN-RDU

If you have access to a club or find a bored agent at a CSC ask them to look up the bag tag. I've had a couple times where "weird scan sequencing" has thrown things off. One AAA-ORD-CLE earlier this year I saw something similar and asked the club agent in ORD to look at it (my flights were already considerably later than planned, and if I could just go straight to the BSO when I got home rather than waiting at baggage claim I would realize ~30 minutes more sleep) and the bag had been scanned on my flight then on a AAA-DTW (IIRC) flight, then off that flight then "on pier" then back on my flight, off my flight, "on pier" for a different pier, then back on my flight and finally offloaded in ORD. [End result my bag made it.]

You should also double check that the claim check in your hand matches the tag number the app is showing. Every once in a while two [or more] bag tags will be printed for one bag, and if one isn't voided there can be dingleberries.

Lesliehr

elynchking

I ended up asking the gate agent at DEN and she was able to see all the info on my bag and it indeed was where it was supposed to be. Glitch.

exerda

Had an interesting one that threw the app's bag tracking for a loop the other day.

I had a same-day itin IAD-EWR-BTV-IAD.

BTV was the destination, and I checked a bag at IAD, and confirmed with the agent that it was indeed only checked through to BTV (and not some nonsensical tagged-at-IAD-for-IAD route).

I got to BTV, and my bag was slow to come out. I pulled up the app, and when I picked my flight from the "Track baggage" link in the app, I got, "There are no checked bags associated with this reservation." I then tried entering the bag tag manually, and got the same thing.

Eventually, my bag showed up as one of the last on the carousel (whew!--was worried I was going to have to have them call IAD baggage handling, get it put on the nonstop afternoon flight, and hope it made it in time for me to load the bag & recheck it for the return flight... yeah, my bag had a giant padded cooler inside it to bring home some delicious beer from Burlington).

All I can figure is that the app was confused by the fact that my trip began and ended at IAD the same day.

TommyC80

Will the app show you if your bag delivery location changed from the originally assigned carousel?

yuenpo

I tried on my SFO-CVG on UA then transfer to CVG-YYZ on AC. After the luggage arrive CVG it just show "offload", then "status not available" when it was passed to AC agent.

lincolnjkc

That implies that the app shows the originally assigned carousel with any regularity which it doesn't IME. The vast majority of the time it jut ends with "En route to baggage claim"/"Check monitors" with no actual belt # -- the overlap of place where a belt number is provided and that belt has subsequently changed is low enough that I haven't seen it update but I won't say its impossible. It would also be dependent on airport staff feeding the updated info to UA's systems which frequently doesn't happen -- just a PA announcement is made. It seems like this mostly happens to me in international arrivals which may behave differently than a normal domestic flight

docbert

I rarely check bags, so today was the first time I ever actually used this feature - and it's great!

Flying SIN-HKG on CX, connecting to UA to SFO. CX had no record of the UA segment at check-in, but did manually add it and checked my bag all the way though - but of course for a cross-alliance transfer with a sub-2 hour connection, you never really know if it's going to work...

However about 40 minutes after landing, sitting in the TG lounge, I can see that my bags have already been loaded onto the UA flight!

tr3k

What happens with an international to domestic connection, where international carrier is not UA?

We got the bags off of the intl flight (at EWR), dropped them off at bag recheck. They were scanned (the agent's scanner "beeped" on each). Never appeared in the app bag tracking as received by UA though.

Does that mean UA will have no responsibility?