[nickaryn]

My husband and I were on a flight on July 26, 2010 from San Francisco to Milwaukee and were traveling with four children. Two of our kids are little and weren't able to carry on their two allowed pieces, so the last person in our group was carrying an extra piece of luggage. The flight attendant, Peggy, wasn't able to keep track of the count (ie: unable to count to 11) and we were told that because she lost count she would have to take the last carry-on and check it in. What? We purposely didn't check any luggage in because our flight was arriving at 10 pm and my husband had to work the next morning, and we didn't want to spend any extra time waiting at baggage claim. Now we would have to waste our time waiting to retrieve that ONE piece of luggage. I tried telling the flight attendant that we had X amount of people in our group and were allowed X amount of carry-ons, but she rudely said, "move along, keep walking, thanks for understanding". After we were seated, my husband went back and tried explaining that we were well within the allowable baggage count and that we wanted our luggage back. He was told there was nothing she could do, despite the fact that the luggage was within reach of my husband and the flight was not full. Needless to say, my son's asthma inhaler and other necessary items were in that confiscated carry-on. So now we are at our final destination, Milwaukee, and we go to baggage claim and of course, our luggage is not there. We then spend another 45 minutes at the Southwest office trying to track and locate our ONE piece of luggage to no avail. 26 hours later our ONE piece of luggage is delivered to our home. I start making calls to "customer relations" and after 10+ attempts of talking to the wrong people, busy signals, waiting and getting disconnected, etc., I finally get through the next day. I reiterate my story to the representative via a 16 minute one-sided conversation, and was told there was nothing they could do and offered me a very insincere and unapologetic quasi-apology and gave me a piece of advice..."next time tell the ticket agent that you have kids who can't carry luggage and that this person and this person will be carrying extra". What? Moral of the story? Don't fly on Southwest. If you do, load up your pockets with whatever you may need for the next day or two.