First, the good about Southwest: 1. Flight operations. 2. Reservations. The reservations people are excellent, but note they have quite limited visibility into other aspects of airline travel. If you can travel without checking baggage, it should be smooth. If you check, or are forced to because your boarding “group” is not high, watch out!
Issue: Two nonstop flights, to DCA and back. 1 piece of baggage mishandled on each flight! Outbound, they lost wife’s walker. To their credit they provided a loaner, but it was larger and more cumbersome. Ours was not lost but was sitting there and it took several days to get them to bring it out. Reason: DCA baggage people rarely answer the phone or return a call.
Second flight: Bag disappeared! SW logs issue and does daily update “We are still looking for your bag” and after 5 days provides a port hole in which to make a claim. Then after working with the port hole and attempting to save claim, it says “An error occurred in NetTracer’s services. Please contact customer support: [big-log-number]” Howaver there is no way to contact Customer Support because apparently CS does not exist! Thus far nobody has helped with the port hole. To add insult to injury, 13 days after the loss they want VICTIM to submit an Airport Police report to try to get baggage video looked at!
Moral of story: Don’t use Southwest unless you can carry all your stuff!
