The top four airports I fly into by number of landings are DEN, LAS, PHX (my home airport) and MSY. I fly to these airports every month.

DEN and LAS are amazing. By the time I arrive at the luggage areas (and it is a hike in both airports) my luggage is either there waiting or soon arrives AND my luggage is almost always among the first ones off.

PHX is hit and miss, but I am usually in the first third but not always.

MSY is another story. Last week my luggage was the 56th piece off the belt and that is typical. I am frequently in the last third. MSY is a mess and I generally dislike the airport for a number of reasons. The service industry uniformly bad, IMHO.

Delete

Now that's not necessarily fair. :p

Truth is Priority Bags is one area where we get graded on. If we do poorly, it hurts us next time we bid for a station. At smaller stations it's also often much, much easier to offload Priority Bags first, as there is just not as many bags to deal with. Yes, there are plenty of smaller stations that don't handle Priority Bags well, but in my (limited) experience waiting for baggage at a hub it's just as hit or miss.

We do a pretty good job at PWM with Priority Bags. All the new agents are trained to ensure they get put on a separate cart and offloaded first. Some of the older ones that weren't trained that way took a while to get used to it, but overall we do fairly well.

Now, Oversize Priority items on the other hand....can be an absolute pain (at least at PWM) to offload first as it requires putting them in our Oversize Room, going inside, unlocking the room, pulling out the Oversize items, relocking the room, and then going back into the Bag Drop area to continue with the rest of the bags. Such a process, haha.

As a person who flies in to PWM pretty often, I agree with the above. I've always had my priority bags come out first or shortly there after.

^ Not that they ever did much in my experience, but it is just stupid how many bags are now "Priority". I feel most sorry for someone who gives UA real $ for these phony "priority" services.

My observations on the priority tags (over the past few years on CO)...

Bags tagged priority either come out first, or last. Never in the middle :(

How does Priorty Baggage work?
 

I'm going in F on UA 903 IAD-DEN and am connecting to a UA express only economy in Denver , will my 2 bags I check in still be tagged priority?
Thanks.

yes.

Just realize that the "priority tags" don't carry the weight you think they do.

Often they come out randomly just like other bags. The most success I see with the tagged bags is in Asian airports such as Singapore, Tokyo, Shanghai but even they aren't always on the ball either.

I've actually had an 75% success rate of the bags coming out within 1-5 minutes of baggage coming out on the conveyer belt within the states and even little airports.

So for sure yes?

Why are you asking again when you had your question answered in the affirmative?

It seems like they've been better about putting the priority bags on the belt first as of late, but in the past no so much.

Our tagged bags came off dead last a couple years ago at VCE, and in one glorious incident at IST (flying UA ORD-FRA and then LH FRA-IST) the bags arrived with absolutely no sign of the priority tag. You know how they sort of attach them into the baggage tag? Well, there was no remnant at all, not even a little scrap of paper where they had been torn off - just gone.

This can be true on occasions, but it depends on the station primarily. Some stations adhere to the significance of the priority tag (i.e. JFK) and others could absolutely care less (i.e. LAX.)

I assume you mean "could absolutely not care less" -- but that hasn't been my experience at LAX. True, it can sometimes take a while for any bags to start arriving on the belt, but once they do, I've found the priority-tagged bags coming out first.

A friend of mine flew CO PHX-IAH-RDU last week and I picked her up at RDU. She was off the plane pretty quickly and by the time we got to the baggage claim (a short walk) her priority tagged bag was already on the carousel! :eek: Never seen that before