DALLAS — Southwest Airlines made changes on Wednesday to speed up the process of reuniting customers with bags at Dallas Love Field.
Hundreds of bags are still roped off in the baggage claim area. Many more have been taken out of walkways and away from walls to an upstairs area at the airport out of both sight and reach of arrive passengers.
Delta and American Airlines didn’t respond to repeated requests from WFAA for information on getting bags to passengers or how many bags each airline had labeled delayed and unclaimed. United said it couldn’t provide a total number of lost, delayed or unclaimed bags currently but said it’s working with passengers through its online tools and with agents over the phone to connect them with luggage.
Christina Arriazola and her group walked through aisles of bags at Love Field, looking for bags they hadn’t seen in five days.
“We’ve been hopping to stores just buying clothes and toiletries and whatever we can. I don’t even have my medications because I just mistakenly put them in the suitcase,” she said. “I’m a little hopeful because they found theirs, so I’m sure it’s here somewhere.”
Southwest reorganized bags into zones to help people find them quicker and also added a new online tool to walk passengers through how to get bags delivered or rerouted to where they need to be.
Arriazola’s flight from Orlando on Friday was canceled, so she and her group drove to Tampa for another flight that got canceled before spending Christmas back in Orlando -- only to have their Monday return trip canceled, too.
“So we had three cancellations, so after that we said forget it, we’re just going to drive,” Arriazola said.
Their bags beat them back and joined rows over other luggage in Love Field and similar scenes played out at LAX, Chicago Midway, and St. Louis’s Lambert International Airport.
“It was worse at Denver,” Matthew Wallace, who came with his family to find bags, said. “This is actually not that terrifying.”
Wallace and his family have been without their ten bags for five days after a cancellation in Denver. They found them in the field of luggage at Love Field.
“We had a couple carry-ons but a lot of us were missing medications, clothes, stuff like that,” he said.
After a half hour and some help, Arriazola found her missing bag, too.
Southwest reorganized bags into zones to help people find them quicker and also added a new online tool to walk passengers through how to get bags delivered or rerouted to where they need to be.
“I’ve never seen anything like this. This is absolutely crazy,” Arriazola said. “You can’t be mad about it because it’s not going to get you anywhere.”