As mentioned, a lot of my blog posts this week are going to be more personal and relating to my vacation. In order for me to write business type posts, I would actually have to think about business, and quite frankly that is not on the agenda!

I have a little downtime this afternoon though and I figured I’d write about my thoughts on the U.S airlines and how completely fuct they are, more specifically United Airlines though. We arrived at Philadelphia airport yesterday and we were pleasantly surprised to find out that although we arrived on time, our luggage never made it on the plane. To make a long story short, I ended up getting all of our luggage here at the beach house around 1:00 A.M. In reality, if this was the worst thing that happens on our vacation, then Hakuna Matata.

But here is the takeaway I got from the whole thing. U.S. air carriers are completely fuct, and will never climb out of debt. United Airlines is so sophisticated now that right next to the baggage carousels they now have automated machines (with people lined up) to make claims for their lost baggage. Then if you try to ask a United employee about your luggage, they just direct you to the machine and act as if losing your luggage is a normal part of travel.

The lady actually told me in a very friendly tone, “Don’t worry we’ll deliver it right to you within 24 hours.” I wanted to respond with “Thanks bitch, I was hoping my family could be stuck in this clothing for the next 24 hours and not have any toiletries, toothbrushes, or swimsuits. ” The fact that lost luggage has become the norm for U.S. carriers is ridiculous.

Luckily in my situation, the luggage was delivered about 12 hours after we got to our destination in the middle of the night. Being from the Midwest though, we actually all enjoyed going to sleep in our underwear and not being able to brush our teeth for over 24 hours….j/k. Nonetheless United did hire a courier to drive 2 ½ hours each way in the middle of the night to deliver my 2 bags. Figure in the courier cost, wages, and gas just to deliver two bags in the middle of the night, and I imagine this cost more than my shitty coach ticket for the flight.

Obviously I was thankful to get my luggage, however in a world where quality assurance is a fundamental part of business, you just have to ask “WTF is wrong with these companies?” I mean they can’t give you a bag of peanuts anymore, or even a snack on domestic flights, but they have no problem expecting a certain % of lost or misplaced luggage every day.

Any other Fortune 500 company would look at how to fix the problem and NOT at how to expensively manage it. This is one of the biggest problems with U.S. carriers. They manage through their problems and don’t attempt to fix them.

Anyways, that’s the end of the rant. So far the trip has been awesome regardless of some minor luggage issues. More to come to later.

Tags: Lost Luggage, UAL, United Airlines

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 10th, 2008 at 7:34 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.