Last week, I travelled to my hometown to visit my family for Thanksgiving. On the way home, the airline lost my luggage. Lost luggage is a bad experience all around. It’s been some time since my luggage has been lost (of course, I also usually don’t check bags), so I was surprised at how bad the user experience is for this occurrence.
There’s no status indicator for the luggage coming off the plane. You’re left to guess whether all of the luggage is off of the plane. This is especially difficult when you’re directed to a baggage claim that’s in use for multiple flights. It’s not really a lot easier when it’s just a single flight, though, since luggage appears in fits and starts. In any event, you have to guess whether you’ve waited long enough for your luggage to fail to appear.
Then it’s time to chat with the lost luggage guy. I consider that job to be akin to tech support, since you never call tech support when everything’s going well. There’s probably a queue, and it’s slow-moving. But this guy at least has some status information to share.
Problem is, his status information isn’t necessarily correct. In my case, he said that my bag had been placed on another flight. That other flight had originally been scheduled to leave before mine, but had mechanical issues and would instead land 45 minutes after my flight. I elected to wait to get my bag, learning an hour later that his status information was wrong. My luggage wasn’t on that flight, either. After checking again, his status information said that the luggage was lost.
Then I was directed to a kiosk to enter in my information for the bag to be delivered. I was appalled at how badly-designed it was. Amongst the questions that it asked was whether they could use a courier service like FedEx or UPS to deliver my bag. My reaction to that was that it meant that I wouldn’t see my bag until the next day, since the fastest shipping that they advertise is next-day delivery. I selected “no”, but then it didn’t tell me how or when my bag would be delivered. I was just prompted to enter my name, address, phone number, and email address. All of this is information that they already had on file. Instead of making me suffer through entering all of that data using the on-screen keyboard, it would’ve been nice if they had simply displayed the already-known information and asked me if that’s where I wanted my bag delivered.
At home, the bad experience continued. The website showed that my bag’s whereabouts where unknown. I finally got a call from the courier company, 6 hours after I’d landed, saying that they could deliver within a couple of hours. They did. Even after I had the bag, the website continued to show that my bag’s whereabouts were unknown.
In short, the lost luggage experience violates several user experience principles:
- show status information
- (corollary: show correct status information)
- provide accurate progress indicators
- minimise the amount of data entry required from the user
While none of these will make my luggage appear any faster, at least this would make me feel more confident in the ability of the airline to recover from their error and deliver my luggage to me in a timely fashion.
There’s the old joke about the guy who goes up to the check-in counter at the airport, and says, “I’m going to New York. I want this bag to go to Dallas, and this bag to go to Miami.”
The fellow behind the counter says, “But sir! We can’t do that!”
And the guy says, “Why not? That’s what you did last week.”
I had one particularly epic lost-luggage experience.
Flight #1: SFO to CMH. My bag didn’t arrive. I was in Columbus for a day without it. The next day, I drove up to Michigan to visit my parents for the weekend, so the airline delivered my bag to me via another airport. They weren’t too pleased about having to deliver it to an airport in another state, but I pointed out that I wasn’t too pleased about them not being able to find my bag for nearly 48 hours. I drove back to Columbus, worked there for another couple of days, then continued on.
Flight #2: CMH to JFK. My bag somehow didn’t make it on the flight with me, but got delivered to my hotel later that night. It was so badly damaged that they brought a new piece of luggage of roughly the same size so that I could transfer my stuff to it.
Flight #3: JFK to IAD. This was my best experience of the whole thing. As I was checking in for this commuter flight, I commented that their airline had already lost my bag twice on this itinerary. Upon hearing this, the check-in agent walked me and my bag over to the TSA, got them to let me through with it, and then had me gate-check the bag. I got to watch my bag get loaded onto the commuter jet, and it was waiting for me at the side of the plane when I landed at Dulles.
Flight #4: IAD to BNA. You guessed it: my new and undamaged bag didn’t get to Nashville until the next day. I think the woman at the lost luggage counter was freaked out when I just started laughing hysterically as I filled out the stupid form again. When I pointed out that they were running three for four on losing my bags on the itinerary so far, she visibly blanched.
Flight #5: BNA to SFO. They actually got my bag onto the flight! It wasn’t damaged or anything! It was one of the first ones off of the plane!