Last week I arrived at the airport in Vancouver to board a flight to Montreal. Uncharacteristically, I brought a piece of luggage to check in. Well, it was a vintage metal cooler filled with underwear, audio gear and wine, but it's the closest thing I've ever had to luggage. The whole thing was secured with packing tape and covered in stickers. Nevertheless, the cooler had to be checked in. There were several bottles of pretty tasty wine in there.
My flight was to depart at 4pm. I walked in to the terminal at 2:45pm and saw the longest check in line I've ever seen before. It went out of the velvet ropes, around the corner down a corridor, past some shops, around another corner, past some more shops, and into an atrium. It was massive. This line was bizarrely long. I walked to the back of the line past concerned faces - each more worried than the last. Hundreds of people, stressed out. Biting fingernails. Calling relatives in other times zones to say they'd be missing their flights. Pouting. By the time I reached the end of the line it was obvious I wasn't going to check my bag on the 4pm flight. From the looks of things, it didn't look like I was going to check luggage on any flight that night. I jumped out of line and walked to the front to do some reconnaissance. I asked people near the front how long they'd been waiting. Two hours. Yikes. No way. The cooler wasn't going to get on the 4pm flight.
I could check into the flight at a self-service terminal, but in order to get the bag on a conveyor belt and onto a plane, I'd have to wait in the line. The airline didn't have self service for bags. I decided I had to make a quick choice: Ditch the cooler if I wanted to get on the flight, or accept the fact that I'd miss the flight, check the cooler in and try my luck at getting on another flight later that night. Either way, I was going to lose something. Time or wine. It's just the way things are sometimes. You just accept where you stand and make a choice. Nobody to blame. You've gotta take the loss and move on.
But I really didn't want to miss the flight. I wanted to get to Montreal that night. I also didn't want to lose that cooler full of wine. People were getting upset. The situation was becoming tense. Complaints. Blaming everyone else. "Last time I fly with this airline.” The usual. Sure, the situation was crappy, but I didn't want to have anything to do with joining the crowd of negativity. That was a surefire way to make nothing good happen. If I started to think that way, I'd surely miss the flight, or lose the cooler. The clock was ticking. I had to figure something out fast. There had to be a way to get on the 4pm flight and get cooler to Montreal.
My mind raced though possible scenarios:
I could bribe somebody at the front of the line to check my bag. But wasn't that illegal?
Maybe I could cancel the flight and book another one with a different, easier-to-check-bags airline. But could I get a refund?
I asked an airport official what would happen if I just left the cooler with a Montreal address on the arrival baggage carousel downstairs. I said, "The airline would find it and then forward it to Montreal because of an 'airport mishap', right?"
"No, the authorities would probably just destroy it. You don't exactly just leave bags lying around at airports."
"Any idea how I can get this cooler on a flight?"
"Line up and hope more airline employees come on shift I guess..."
There were no airline employees available for questions whatsoever. The three I could see were frantically checking people's bags in, but the check in bag line continued to grow. How would this work? There's always a way. The light bulb went off in my head. I walked over to a janitor and asked, "Do you know if there's a post office in the airport?"
"Yep, two floors down."
Bingo. There was a way!
I ran over to the self check in station and grabbed my boarding pass. Then zipped downstairs to the post office and heaved the cooler onto the counter. "I'd like mail this to Montreal please."
"No problem sir, that'll be $35.79."
I was out of the post office in a flash and boarded the flight less than a minute before the flight attendants locked the door. My cooler arrived two days later, but some wine tastes better with age anyhow, right?
Now, it's a pretty sad state of affairs when an airline is so mismanaged their customers resort to checking bags by mail. I sent a letter to the airline with a request to be reimbursed for the postage, and the jury is still out if I'll see any of that cash again, but thirty five bucks to simplify a cross-continental journey is a pretty good deal I'd say. So things might conspire to create a less-than-ideal situation, but there's usually a way to make things happen so you can have your wine and drink it too.
