This is a continuation of what happens when you check your bags and how they can be separated. Part One can be found here.
When the bag gets to T-point, it leaves the belt and goes onto a large circular carousel. Bag carts are placed around the carousel, and Ramp Agents have specific flights in their zone to take bags from the carousel and place on a cart. 
It doesn't happen often, but sometimes a Ramp Agent can misread the destination code on the bag. For instance, BNA is Nashville, Tennessee, but SNA is Orange County, California. Opposite sides of the country. Here's an example of how a misload can happen and what was done to fix it:
Last year, BNA had a city that would send our bags to SNA and their bags to us. It happened on the same flights several times a day. As you can imagine, being on opposite sides of the country limits our options to return each other's bags. After four or five days of the same problem, I sent the offending city an e-mail. They took a look at what was happening and for a way to fix it. It turns out, that several times during the day, they had carts for BNA and SNA side by side! So you see, by misreading the tag, or turning left instead of right, human error caused a preventable bag delay. After being made aware of the situation, the problem was corrected by moving BNA and SNA carts into other areas at T-point. Problem solved!
Now that your bag is on a cart with a hundred other bags to your destination, it gets taken out to the flight about 20 - 25 minutes before departure. That's why we have to have a cut-off time as mentioned in part 1.
Now for another suggestion. 7) Travel earlier in the day. I know it's not always possible, but it will give us more time and flight options to get your bag rerouted if it is delayed. This can be especially important if you are going on a cruise or have that big presentation at 7:00 a.m. the next day.
So, now your bag is loaded.
It's been handled by another four or five people to get it on the plane. Your flight departs and you make a connection to your final destination. Guess what? More baggage handling. Unloading, transferring gates, and reloading will see your bag handled by at least five more people. (If you are keeping count, we are at 15.)
Finally, you and your bag have made it to your final destination. But wait, there's more! (I've always wanted to say that.) Your bag still has to be unloaded and transported to baggage claim. 
That will involve another three or four of our Ramp Agents.
Now your bag is on the claim belt and almost back in your hands. There is one last possible delay. The dreaded bag swap! Someone else took your bag by mistake. Unfortunately, this is out of our control. That's why we announce and have posted that bags look alike and tags should be checked. But, if it happens, don't worry. We'll sort out the mixup, and have your bag delivered to you.
Speaking of the claim belt, how about a few more suggestions? 8) Come straight to baggage claim. Wait to go get your rental car or have lunch. If your bag is delayed, the sooner you let us know, the faster we can start looking for it. Sometimes, we can even double-check the plane before it leaves. 9) Make your bag identifiable. Lots of people use a black roller bag. There's nothing wrong with that, but a few identifying marks can help prevent a bag swap and even let you pick your bag out from a distance. Use something more than a piece of red yarn. Try fabric paint with a creative design. One of my favorites was the guy who took the time to paint "NOT YOURS" in three-inch letters on his bag. Another one was the lady who painted sunflowers on all sides of her bag.
By now, I hope that I haven't scared you into believing that your bag will get lost and never be found. Most of the time all goes according to plan. Although bags are handled by real people with the possibility of human error, our folks do their best to make sure your bag arrives when you do. And hopefully, my suggestions will lower your chance of a delayed bag even more. While we'd prefer to never delay a bag, realistically, as a Company, our goal is to delay no more than four bags per 1000 Customers. During all of 2006, our average was slightly higher at 5.34. So, we have some work to do! But, it's still better than most of the competition!!
I can promise you, everyone at Southwest Airlines is working hard to get your bag on your flight and to keep the number of delayed bags as low as possible.
Comments
... and for those who work in aviation: I recuperated a tooling flag (a long strip of red pretty indestructible fabric with a metal eye) and tie-wrapped it to the base of the handle on my case.
It's good enough for a Ramper to spot from a distance, and I immediately know which one if my bag as soon as it pops up on the carrousel!
I've also written my name and cell phone number on it with a permanent marker, which can help get it back to me if needs be!
(of course, if too many people do this, there will soon be an endless stream of bags with red markers on them coming out onto the carrousel! :o)
I think that using letters and nubers is not fare. I make sure I am at the airport in the recommeded time fram and on my morning flights am generally the first or second person in the A line. So infect You are penalizing the individuals who adhere to the recomended time frame.
In protest I will be flying the next two weeks with another airline and will in the future continue to go to with other airlines when the prices are competative.
Bert,
Thank you for such an interesting continuation.
Ramp Agents are really unsung heroes of the Southwest operation. Customers rarely, if ever, see them face-to-face and therefore have little opportunity to personally thank them or note them by name in a letter to Customer Relations.
If any rampers are reading this blog, thank you!
Yea Bert!
Thanks for posting the brilliant explanation and those wonderful tips to our customers. As your Baggage Service Office counterpart in Orange County, I can attest to the former BNA/SNA bag confusion. And I'm happy that the steps taken has significantly reduced the confusion to nearly none. Of course the ramp crews are humans (like everyone else!) and will make a mistake from time to time, but I'm proud that we're always looking for new ways to minimize our errors.
All the BEST to you in BNA!
4 delays out of 1000 is not too bad. What % get destroyed? Last year SWA told me my bag fell off the cart and got run over by something [smaller than a 737] and all I got back was the handle, the contents and a free SWA black roller bag. I'd love to know what really happened out there.
Bob
Hi Bob,
I don't know what the percentage of destroyed bags is but I can tell you that in my experience in the Baggage Service Office, it's got to be extremely low. I've seen very few "runover" bags over the years.
I'm glad that you got a brand new bag and that nothing inside was ruined (we'd have gladly compensated you if it had been). It's not a pleasant experience to have to tell someone that they're bag has been "totalled" - even less of a pleasure to hear it said to you I'd imagine.
A Big hats off to those of you who properly tag bags headed for either "Orange County (SNA)" or "San Diego (SAN)"! At my home airport SMF
(Sacramento) to too could get messed up with Louisville (SDF). 22 departures out of 84 daily departures are either to Orange County or San Diego. And to fix this, you need to put the bags on two planes since Southwest doesn't do the very short hop from Orange County to San Diego.
So to those of you in Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Jose, Oakland and Sacramento with strong frequency to both Orange County and San Diego. A very big hats off to getting the SNA/SAN right!!!
Regading the 5 days (how many customers is that before somebody took action?!) of SNA and BNA swapping, are you saying the responsibility for ensuring proper destination of the bags ends at the cart?
If neither the person at the bottom of the conveyor nor the person at the top is responible for looking at tags, at least occasionally, that may explain a few things.
Or do I misunderstand the process?
I'm glad my home airport is BWI. Luckily Southwest only flys to five cities that start with the letter B and none have airport codes close to that. It is nice to live close a major hub so I'm sure every handler knows what airport that is plus I know another Southwest flight isn't far behind should my luggage get lost or misdirected. It hasn't gotten lost with SWA but it did get lost both ways on my trip when I flew American last year. (Only reason I was on American is because SWA doesn't fly to Minneapolis or to many other other cities in the midwest.) I won't fly AA again!
Southwest does a great job with bag handling!!!
Hi Bob,
I think the only thing you may be misunderstanding about the process is the element of time. We perform 20 minute turnarounds - which means our Ramp Agents have 20 minutes to unload all the inbound bags into tugs and load up the all outbound bags into the aircraft. Most of the time, we're talking about hundreds of bags and three Ramp Agents.
And while Ramp Agents generally do make the fair assumption that all the bags in the Oakland cart are supposed to be headed to Oakland, they absolutely *do* catch mistakes while loading and unloading the aircraft.
If the correct flight hasn't left, the bag is simply brought back to T-point and placed on the correct cart. But if the "caught" bag missed the flight our customer traveled on or arrived at the wrong destination, the Ramp Agents let us Customer Service Agents know in the Baggage Service Office. This way, we can give a heads up to the Baggage Service Office in the correct city so our customer can be paged in the baggage claim area when they're flight arrives. We'd much prefer to inform and take care of them immediately rather than have them standing around waiting for a bag that's coming in an hour or two.
I hope this helps!
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