baggage fees Archives - Page 2 of 2

Changes galore in fees and service charges on Alaska Airlines/Horizon Air

Heads up, Alaska Airlines or Horizon Air customers. A bunch of changes to the airlines’ fees and services were announced today. The news is good and bad…

Here’s a rundown:

Effective for travel on or after June 16 for tickets purchased beginning May 1.

Checked bags and baggage service guarantee

It will cost you $20 for each of your first three checked bags. This is a $5 increase for the first checked bag, a $5 decrease for the second, and a $30 decrease for the third.

There’s also a change to the carriers baggage service guarantee. Yes – there’s a service guarantee!

Instead of promising you they’ll get your bags to your within 25 minutes the airlines now promise to get bags to you within 20 minutes. And if the bags don’t show up in 20 minutes they’ll either give you 2,000 Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan miles or $20 off a future flight.

Unaccompanied minors

Alaska and Horizon are also lowering the fees for unaccompanied minors ages 5 to 12.

The new fees are $25 per child for direct flights and $50 per child for connecting flights.

This is a reduction from the current $75 fee, which applied to several children traveling together.

[Note: As of tomorrow, April 23, 2010, Southwest Airlines is raising its fares on unaccompanied minors; see news about this and other airlines’ unaccompanied minor fees in my msnbc.com column “Are Airlines Cashing in on your kids?”]

Same-day confirmed travel

If you want to change your flight within six hours of departure, it will cost $25 to confirm a seat.

Outside of that six-hour window, you must pay the difference in fare plus any applicable change fee. Until now, for a flight on the same calendar day it seems you could pay this $25 same-day confirmed fee or stand by for free.

Instant ticketing and refund policy

Effective May 12, you will no longer be able to hold reservations for 24 hours without payment when booking directly with the airlines, but you’ll get one free change or a full refund within 24 hours of purchase on all tickets.

For more details see the Alaska Airlines website.

Improving the odds of having your baggage arrive when you do.

My Well Mannered Traveler column – Mishandled baggage: Mission Accomplished? – on MSNBC.com this week is all about the odds of having your checked baggage arrive at your destination airport when you do – and the airlines’ efforts to improve those odds.

The good news is that those odds have been improving. According to statistics released recently by the Department of Transportation (DOT), in 2009 the major U.S. carriers reduced the rate of mishandled, mangled and lost bags to the lowest level recorded since 2004.

Hooray, right? Well, just maybe. In 2009 major airlines mishandled “just” 3.91 bags per 1,000 passengers. That’s an improvement over 2008’s rate of 5.26 but, still, more than 2.19 million pieces of luggage went astray in 2009.

What’s behind the numbers?

The numbers are better, so we might conclude that airlines aren’t just pocketing our checked bags fees but using that money to improve baggage handling systems.

Some actually did. But last year’s improved statistics have more to do with depressed travel patterns than with airline attentiveness. In 2009, there were fewer passengers, fewer flights and, therefore, fewer checked bags to be mishandled.

Will it last?

The improved baggage handling numbers will only last, says Catherine Mayer, a vice President at SITA, a company specializing in information technology (IT) for the air transport industry, if airports, airlines, and ground handlers “use this slow travel period to invest in fixing the baggage management system.”

One tool being used by airlines, airports and ground handlers is the baggage improvement program, or BIP. Created by IATA, the International Air Transport Association, the program’s goal is to halve the global rate of baggage mishandling by 2012. Not just to make passengers happy, say IATA spokesman Steve Lott, but to help airlines fix their bottom lines: “Globally, mishandled baggage cost airlines $3.3 billion in 2008. So the airline industry has a financial incentive to make sure they close the gap.”

The fixes include some costly, sophisticated technology but also some cheap common sense ones, such as painting spacing lines on the belt behind the check-in counter so bags don’t begin their journey all bunched up.

There are also some things you can do to help increase the odds of your bags arriving safely. In addition to putting your contact information and travel itinerary inside your baggage, inspect the outside of your bags before each trip. If there are old tag stubs and bar code labels stuck on your luggage from a previous journey, remove them. That way you won’t run the risk of confusing the automatic barcode readers in the baggage handling system and having your bags end up in a city you visited back 1999.