ST. LOUIS — Thousands of people are still searching for their bags at St. Louis Lambert International Airport.
Southwest Airlines staff at Lambert said as of Wednesday afternoon there are roughly 7,000 bags at an airport warehouse and 3,000 bags actually in the Southwest Airlines.
“It was absolutely awful trying to get any information. My family was on the customer service hotline for three hours just to find out if my bag was in Texas or in Missouri,” Southwest Passenger Jacob Knopp said.
Knopp said he spent five days at the airport in Austin, Texas trying to get home to his family in St. Louis for the holidays.
“There was one time where I actually got to be on the plane ready to go and I was so happy on Christmas night. But then they said that there was some sort of legal issue with flight attendants and just took us all off the plane. My Christmas was kind of ruined because of this,” Knopp said.
The staff said this luggage pile up is happening for several reasons either the passenger made it, and the luggage didn’t, or the luggage made it and the passenger didn’t. The latter is what happened to Southwest passenger Christy Merrell.
“I waited in line for seven hours on the day after Christmas to learn that my bag was flown on a cargo plane to Santa Ana and that it should be coming back soon,” Merrell said.
Even though Knopp finally made it and found one of his bags, he’s not sure where the other one is.
“I hope that I can find my stuff. I have a lot of very important stuff in there...like work equipment, Christmas presents, all sorts of stuff like that,” Knopp said.
Southwest staff said they are working as fast as they can to scan each piece of luggage and contact the owners, but to make the process go faster, they have put up a web page. This is where you can claim your luggage and tell them what you want them to do with it, which has not been an option until now.
Merrell said she has not been able to track her bag herself.
“I have been tracking it on the phone, but you can't. There's the app and everything on the website that you normally would track. Things are just all fried and unusable,” Merrell said.
If you need to file a claim with Southwest for your luggage or update a claim to add delivery or pickup instructions, click here.
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