jbsay

I was booked to fly DCA-DFW-DEN on 8/15. Due to the ATC snafu in ZDC, my flight to DFW was canceled; I wasn't automatically rebooked, so I fired up ExpertFlyer and called the airline. The only feasible rerouting out of the WAS area at the time was BWI-PHL-DEN the following morning on 8/16. (I fault the FAA for this situation, although AA could have been more proactive; when I finally got a hold of the Platinum desk, 30 min after learning of my flight cancellation, the agent initially said my flight was still scheduled to depart 45m late.)

The next day, on 8/16, I flew BWI-PHL-DEN with a checked bag. My layover in PHL was over 2 hours, I had a OW priority tag, and neither flight was delayed, so I assumed my bag would be in DEN when I landed.

Nope—it's not there. I asked an agent about it, who said my bag was in CLT (not PHL or BWI). Instead of sending my bag to PHL on my flight, or the later BWI-PHL flight—which arrived 32m *before* my PHL-DEN flight departed—US sent my bag to CLT on a flight that departed BWI 3.5 hours after I checked in.

At 3:40PM ET, when the DEN baggage agent told me my bag was in CLT, she was unsure if it would be placed on the 4:30PM CLT-DEN flight, even though the baggage tracker indicated my bag had been at the CLT baggage office for over 2 hours. I hung around the airport for an hour, and went back to the desk; I was told my bag was not on the 4:30PM CLT-DEN flight, so I left the airport and decided to handle the issue over the phone.

Between 7:00PM and 12:00AM, I called the baggage desk four times to inquire about my bag and ask that it be forwarded to DEN. Yet after missing the 4:30PM CLT-DEN flight, it subsequently missed both the 8:25PM and 10:30PM CLT-DEN flights. I cannot imagine that 3 mid-con A321 flights were weight-restricted such that a delayed Platinum member's bag could not be accommodated on any flight. I was never offered compensation, nor did I ask for it while at the airport, given that the agent assured me my bag would arrive in DEN the same day.

Finally, my bag was sent to DEN the next morning, although I'm honestly not sure this would have happened had I not involved AA's Twitter desk.

So, all told, I ultimately arrived in DEN 19 hours after my scheduled arrival time, and my bag arrived over 20 hours later. What should I ask the airline to do about this?

Often1

Your delay has nothing to do with AA. Sounds as though they rerouted you pretty decently in light of the FAA mess.

The bag arrived a day late. That's not uncommon in a massive system which is likely backed up with thousands of bags from the day before's mess. But, if you send in a 2-sentence complaint (I really mean 2 sentences) and leave out all of the background clutter in your post, AA will likely toss you a smallish customer service gesture of a few miles (not many).

As an aside and to reduce stress, if this happens again, use the baggage tracker online. Calling constantly just raises stress. The agent is plugging your information into the same application you can use and he doesn't know more than you can find out for yourself online.

jbsay

Agreed. As I said, I blame FAA for the flight cancellation and resulting delay

I've had many bags arrive a day late over the years, and I generally understand that it's part of checking a bag. But such delays have always involved (1) an outstation without frequent (or any) mainline service; (2) systemic IRROPS roughly concomitant with the baggage issue; or (3) a complex international long-haul itinerary. My frustration isn't that my bag arrived a day late per se, but that it ended up sitting at an airport at which I didn't connect even though I checked the bag at a major non-hub airport on a day without any abnormal IRROPS whatsoever. It's not as if I flew on Saturday, when ZDC was on the fritz; I didn't depart until Sunday morning, some 16 hours after the ERAM was fully operational. Sending my bag to CLT when it's tagged to fly BWI-PHL-DEN is simply ridiculous given modern barcode scanning technology. This mistake is compounded by the fact that the bag wasn't rushed aboard a BWI-CLT flight, but instead sat around BWI for 3.5 hours before it was put on a plane.

Good point—lesson learned. But I don't see why the Platinum desk was unable to simply call up the CLT baggage desk and arrange for an agent to locate my bag and tag it for the next flight within, say, an hour or two from the time of the request. I realize there was surely some residual baggage backlog due to the previous day's ATC snafu, but allowing a Platinum member's bag to miss *three* non-stop mainline flights to its final destination just doesn't make sense absent severe and recurring weight restrictions—which generally aren't an issue on mainline mid-cons.

JDiver

Assuming there was such a thing as a "Platinum desk" and that they'd find it easier to contact baggage services than we could, or that there was an iota of concern for a single flyer when the baggage hits the fan for hundreds, if not thousands. CK (therefore EP) AirPass with high Helix, maybe. The rest of us? Risible.