Baggage Fee Refunds? Think Again
My wife loves to buy shoes on the internet. She finds great deals and some of the styles she finds are tough to locate anywhere else so a lot of her shoes are unique. The only trouble is, very few of the brands she buys are consistent when it comes to size, so she ends up returning a lot of the shoes because they don’t fit properly. I feel her pain; I wear an 11 Nike running shoe, but a 13 in a Keen sandal. I just don’t want to deal with the return. She reminds me, “Returns are easy and I always get my money back.” Maybe I’m just impatient.
It is nice, I suppose, that companies are quick to refund your money if you are unsatisfied with your mail order product. Did you know it is the law? Sure, companies are professional and “fair” for the most part, but there is actually a law that states that mail-order products must offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee. It harkens all the way back to the days of the first mail order catalogs, where the government decided that consumers needed protection from nefarious dealers who put poor or misleading pictures into their ads to entice people to buy.
What do you think would happen if a company collected your money, and then sent your product to the wrong address? UPS, the dealer, or the company you purchased the item from would recover, reimburse, or somehow correct the problem for you, right? In most cases, they even offer you free shipping to balance their mistake!
Now consider this; If you pay your airline a baggage fee for every piece of luggage that you check to your destination, you assume the fee is to help the airline recover the additional fuel, manpower, and resources to move your bag from your departure city to your destination, right? What if, for example, you’re traveling to Miami and they accidentally send your bag to Honolulu? You’d get your money back, right?
Wrong!
As it stands now, once the airline has collected your baggage fee there’s no getting it back; regardless of where they send or what they do to your luggage! Quite a few bags get lost every day and while most of them are eventually recovered and delivered to you, is it really fair for them to make you pay for the “privilege” of living without the contents of your luggage for the day or two it takes them to find you? In the worst case, they may lose your bag entirely; and you’ve paid them for that “service!” “Here’s $50, would you throw away my essential belongings please so that I’ll never find them again?”
Fortunately, the government has intervened. They’re considering a law that would require the airlines to refund your baggage fee(s), should they fail to transport your bags to the same destination, and at the same time that they managed to transport you to. So, write your congressmen! I know it’s not necessarily a “big deal” in the grand scheme of life, but it’s the business travelers who will make a difference on this issue and if you don’t vote now, your complaints won’t be heard later!
EXTRA: If you have questions for Ken regarding business travel, hotels, airplanes, etc, please send him a “Tweet” on his twitter account. You can also follow Ken on Twitter @foodbreeze!
