by Jeff Sovern
Thursday night, my daughter waved goodbye to her suitcase at LaGuardia as she flew to Atlanta for a wedding. She arrived in Atlanta at 10:30 pm, but her bag was a no show. She optimistically, but as it happened, pointlessly, stayed at the airport until 1:00 am at the advice of Delta employees, searching for the bag. The following morning she called Delta, spent almost an hour on hold, and was finally told the bag had been scanned into the airport on Friday! She raced to the airport, but in fact the person on the phone had misled her and the bag was not there. Now she faced her own private Mission Impossible: the wedding was only three hours away and Delta had wasted still more of the time she could have used to replace her wedding attire. She zoomed to a mall and made it to the wedding, but sadly missed the vows. Meanwhile, her bag is still missing, as of Saturday morning.
Even children of consumer law professors have consumer law problems. Even if they no longer have a suitcase.
My experience with getting the BAG was 4 hours on the phone, a missed train out of London (waiting on said bag on day 3) and a quick shopping trip for socks and underwear. My experience with getting COMPENSATED has been 60 days with no response to the initial claim, or a response to the second claim, a 2 hour hold on the phone, an online claim system that can’t find the reference number — and so far 90 minutes today waiting on a text response in their messaging system.
My experience with Delta is that they only guarantee they will get you and your luggage (perhaps not together) to a specific destination at some general point in time. Might be a different plane at a different time (or day) flight. Might have to wait a day of two for your bags. Might have damaged possessions. But your body and possessions will get there eventually. And they’ll compensate you for the hassle, perhaps even giving you a free ticket or refund or something like that. But the hassle just isn’t worth it.
A similar consumer experience was the origin story for my first domain name case: my client Bill Porta’s luggage disappeared when he was on his way (via Alitalia) to be the best man at a friend’s wedding. The result was Alitaliasucks.com. The site is no longer available but you can read it on the Wayback Machine
https://web.archive.org/web/20040327141003/http://www.alitaliasucks.com/