…and the worst is, they SLAP you in the face with.. AHHHh you should have arrived earlier.

I have learned the hard way that there are different baggage check-in times for the curb-side check versus the baggage check at the interior of the airport, also. At ORD recently I arrived at the United terminal to find an extremely long baggage check line (due to the fact that only 2 actual attendants were working at a hub airport line of probably 30 or 40 check-in windows) so I thought for a second and decided to use the curb-side check, which I almost never do. I had arrived at the airport an hour before my domestic flight. I waited in the curb-side line for about 15 minutes or so — it was much shorter than the interior line — and by the time I got up to the front, the agent denied my bag! It turns out I had gotten to the front of this line exactly 44 minutes prior to my departure time. Meanwhile, NOWHERE is it posted that the curb-side check time differs from the interior check time. There was even an agent walking up and down the interior line telling people to jump out to the curb-side for a “shorter line and only a $2 fee!” –NO MENTION of an idiosyncratic 15 minute check-in differential! As you can guess, after much arguing, I went back inside with my bag and by this point did not have enough time to wait through the abysmal interior line before its 30 minute cut-off took effect. I had to literally force an agent to rebook me onto a later flight, and let me tell you, it was an AWFUL experience and very difficult to effect.

I understand that it must take a little longer to pull the little curb-side cart around to the interior baggage collection area (in this case only about 15 feet away, but alright, fine, I’ll give them this reasoning); however, what bothers me extremely is that:
1) This cut-off time was never once mentioned (there is a great missed opportunity on the curb-side check-in signage itself, which clearly states the $2 fee but nothing more)
2) The agents trying to hawk their $2 service seem to deliberately avoid mentioning a cut-off time difference
3) In my particular case, the baggage cart with the entire 15 minutes of previous bag checks was *still waiting to be taken inside when I stepped up to have my bag checked.* They could very easily have thrown my bag right on top with everyone else’s, but instead, argued with me that it was too late *while the cart stood idly next to them.*

The whole experience was extremely frustrating and caused me to have to take a later flight, missing paid work time, etc. I probably should have written a letter about it at the time, and now I regret not doing it… anyway, I thought it would be worth a warning to your readers!

Those systems are quite probably one of the biggest fiascos (or at least the most known) in the airport business. Those systems never worked as designed, and every carrier except United never used the system. Even then, United only used the system for outbound luggage checked at Denver. They dismantled the system in 2005 or 2006 because cost one million dollars per year to keep running.

So we’ve got a conveyor and baggage cart system at Denver, not a fancy automated system..