American Airlines New Baggage Delivery Service

American Airlines announced a new baggage delivery service in conjunction with BAGS VIP Luggage today.  Starting August 6^th American will offer a more “convenient and relaxing” way to bypass baggage claim at your destination airport.

BAGS VIP Luggage will deliver your checked American Airlines bag(s) wherever you want (hotel, home, office, etc) once you arrive at your final destination.

The service costs $29.95 for one bag, $39.95 for two bags and $49.95 for three to 10 bags.  For delivery locations within 40 miles from the airport, your bags will arrive within one to four hours.  For delivery locations between 41 and 100 miles from the airport, there will be an additional $1 per mile charge and an estimated delivery time between four and six hours instead of one to four hours.  The service is available at 200 U.S. domestic airports and select international Pre-Clearance cities.

This is actually a good idea with some real potential value for the right customer.  As an example:

You’re traveling for business and have a couple days of meetings or a week long conference.  You may want luggage you can check for extra clothes, normal sized toiletries, presentation materials, etc.  If you happen to arrive the day of your first meeting and don’t have time to waste at baggage claim or don’t want to go to your hotel first with your bag you can go straight to your meeting and not worry about your bag.  Additionally, this service would eliminate the hassle of lugging your checked bag around with you to your meeting or keeping it in your rental car or coworker’s car until you checked into your hotel later.

There are certainly other useful examples of how to leverage this service but this example came to mind first.  I’m sure American is hoping businesses will pay the extra $30 for their employees to use this service.  Quite frankly, depending on the situation it might be worth it to pay for it yourself!  We’ll see how well this takes off once it goes live in a few days.

I do have a few questions about the service though, such as what happens if my luggage is lost, and what happens if my bags are delivered outside of the time window.  I am waiting to hear back about these questions from American and will share my answers when I get them.

You can learn more about the service directly from American here.

I could have used this service recently on a trip to New York to save my wine!  Here is a picture of an American Airlines Agent at LaGuardia Airport happy to take my wine which I neglected to check and couldn’t get through security 😦

American Airlines Agent in LGA with my wine
Photo: Contrail Commentary