Thursday, July 07, 2005

How can you be so bad...

...that you make the airlines look good. Seems like an impossibility doesn't it? Well I've discovered an organisation that has achieved the impossible.

In an earlier post I discussed my experience with airlines losing my luggage. As frustrating as it is when it happens, what I didn't mention is that every single time I've had my luggage back within 24 hours.

My sister-in-law came to visit last week after taking an Alaskan cruise out of Seattle. Somehow her bag was lost between the ship and the shore and wasn't located in time to make her flight from Seattle to Denver. Unfortunately the cruise line's policy is to send the bag by ground and only to addresses within the US and Canada. Otherwise, they will send it by sea to your home address, which in my sister-in-law's case is Australia and would have taken 3 months! Fortunately her next stop was our place in Colorado and she's here for two weeks, because with the 4th of July holiday in between, the bag only arrived today after six days. In the meantime she's been wearing clothes borrowed from my wife for a week.

This policy may be OK for the 90% of their customers who are residents of the US and Canada and are heading home after the cruise. In those circumstances you can usually get by without your bag for a few days. But for the other 10% it seems to be a completely inadequate attempt to rectify what is, after all, their mistake.

Clearly it would be better if they shipped the bag by air. Sure it would cost a bit more, but they could restrict it to customers who are not residents of the US or Canada. Anyway, does this happen so often that the additional cost would really matter? If it does, then they really need to fix their processes. It can't be rocket science moving a bag from a ship to an adjacent terminal.

Shame on you Celebrity Cruises.

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