We had an appalling experience with United at this airport. The flight that we were waiting for bags for came in after 10 PM, so the airport staff would be limited as we soon would find out. The conveyor belt stopped when there were still plenty of people around so it didn't even occur to me that that was the end of baggage service for the flight. Soon afterward a young man in a safety vest came over and unloaded all of the remaining bags off of the conveyor belt. After doing that he then took off his safety vest and went over and unlocked the United baggage claim office. He sat behind the computer and then started the process of dealing with a long line of angry customers. I felt really bad for him because it wasn't his fault that so many people were without bags, but many were taking out their frustrations on him. He informed us that the next flight in from the area where the bag was was 1 PM the next day. That meant we wouldn't be getting our bag until the afternoon of the next day. He took our address information and cell phone number.
The next day we got a text message update with a tracking number and instructions to go to United.com/bagtrack in order to see the status of our claim. When you go to the website it says "To display information about your delayed bag, enter your 10-character file reference in the first box below, your last name in the second box and click the Continue button". They show you what you should enter in the field: "For example: IAH12345M". The tracking number that we were texted was in the exact same format as that example. Look at it closely. It only has nine characters but the website is saying to enter your 10 character tracking number. Sure enough when we entered it we got an error back. So we had no way to electronically track the status of the bag. Keep in mind that this is supposed to be the first day of vacation where we should be exploring shops, trying new restaurants, and just enjoying Savannah. We tried calling United multiple times. The first time after 25 minutes waiting to talk to someone we had to hang up to go eat lunch. The second time after 20 minutes we were disconnected. It added so much frustration and exasperation to have to be dealing with this.
The text message that we received at 11 AM was the first and last text message update, even though the text message said that we would be receiving updates every six hours. Finally after 8 PM we were able to get through on the phone to what I assume was an overseas call center. We had a huge communication problem with the agent. Even though we were speaking the tracking number by saying S as in Sam, A as in apple, V as in Victor, etc. the agent still kept screwing up reading it back to us. Finally we got frustrated and asked for a supervisor. Then all of a sudden he was able to pull up our information and confirm that our bag was still scheduled to be delivered that night. Around 9 PM our bag finally showed up.
I understand that delays can happen, and they had many other bags to deliver besides ours. That's not what I have issue with. If there would have been a sensible, functioning system that would let us know the status of our claim it wouldn't have been a big deal. Because we had no idea when, or even if our bag was being delivered it was a huge inconvenience. Do you dare go far away from the address where the bag is being delivered for dinner? Do we drive to the airport to try and talk to someone to get an update? Do we buy clothes and toiletries to replace the ones in the suitcase? If we had even a general idea of what was happening a lot of those questions would be answered. I would be extremely hesitant to fly United after this fiasco. read more