MESSAGE CENTER

Baggage Tag Mishaps

AS A 20-year-plus veteran of airline customer service with United Express and a manual writer for Independence Air, I can vouch for what the United flight attendant told reader Richard Boyden [Message Center, Feb. 18]. Unfortunately, baggage tag and boarding pass swaps are very common and usually happen when agents are working too fast. We used to call it "working faster than the speed of thought." At many airlines' counter positions, two agents share a single boarding pass and tag printer to keep equipment costs down. This is a leading cause of lost bags and pass swaps. Over the years, I came to think of this as a false economy.

Two things that I always did (and trained others to do) as both an agent and a supervisor was to match the name on the boarding pass with the name displayed on my computer terminal at check-in, and then check the destination against the boarding pass. It only takes a few seconds. Then I would tell the customer that I had just checked X number of bags to city Y. I occasionally prevented exactly what Mr. Boyden reports.

I always encouraged my customers at check-in to review their boarding passes and baggage tags before leaving the counter. Both the boarding passes and the baggage tags have the cities' and passengers' names clearly printed on them.

Of course, this all takes time, which is anathema to many airline managers who judge their employees on how many customers they can "process" per hour. They need to be reminded that the point is how many passengers and bags are accurately processed per hour, not the raw numbers.

Gregg Bender

Charles Town, W.Va.

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