If you fly American or US Airways, you may just find a good use for that baggage claim ticket you receive when you check your bag at the ticket counter. No longer is it only useful if you actually lose your bag.
Now you can use the information it contains to track your bags in real time.
This new free service is an effort by American to reduce the number of bags it reports as lost to the US Department of Transportation. (You probably didn’t know they had to do that, did you?)
In the July 2015 report (interesting reading for a travel nerd), American ranked 10th out of 13 carriers, with four bags lost for every 1,000 passengers it transported.
Palermo (italy) Airport Baggage Claim
That doesn’t sound so bad, but compared to the top three with the least number of bags lost — Virgin America (less than one bag for every 1000 passengers), JetBlue (/1000), and Delta (/1000) — maybe American felt it was time this process issue was addressed.
In order to track your bag, all you have to do is go to /baggage and click the “track your bags” link. Enter your last name and either your record locator (which is on your boarding pass) OR baggage ID number from your baggage claim ticket, and you can see a record of each of the six times your bag will be scanned from check-in to baggage claim carousel loading.
The tracking feature is currently available on American’s standard and mobile sites, but has not yet been incorporated into its mobile app.
In our next article, we’ll tell you how USDOT actually determines what constitutes a “lost” bag.
Have you ever suffered a lost bag on a recent trip? What happened? How did you manage? Leave us a comment below or on our Facebook page.
Photo credit: Bernhard J. Scheuvens (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons)