Long lines waiting to check a bag seem like an unnecessary bottleneck. But they’re one of the biggest risks that force you to show up at the airport early.
Two months ago I checked bags for the first time on an American Airlines itinerary departing Charlotte. The kiosks rejected me – it was an international trip, where my reservation actually began the day before. So I stood in line at Priority Check-in for more than 45 minutes as the moments to departure ticked away.
In the end I had plenty of time to make the flight, thanks to a delay. But it was not a pleasant experience – and most of the time long lines for assistance are totally unnecessary, because for most itineraries you should be able to drop and go.
Here’s something that airlines just get wrong – that they can fix, but most don’t. One passenger captured it well. They used the self-service kiosk, but with just one employee accepting self-tagged bags, the whole process still took a full hour.
@AmericanAir thanks so much for having one (1) person working bag drop at Boston Logan. Nothing better than using a self kiosk to tag your bag in 2 mins and then having to wait an HOUR to actually drop it off. Insane. pic.twitter.com/Onym5DeRQA
— mgrover11B (@mattygrover92) May 16, 2026
Yet you don’t need the employee pecking away at their keyboard at all! Self-service bag drop, or automated bag drop, is something that can be done and in fact some airlines do it.
- check in via app
- print or activate bag tags
- put the bags on an automated belt
- scan your boarding pass, tag and ID
Boom, your bag is accepted into the baggage system without a staff member needing to even be present except potentially to show customers what to do or assist with exceptions.
Alaska Airlines has this at Seattle and Portland. At Frankfurt and Munich, Lufthansa passengers drop baggage themselves by scanning a boarding pass at a kiosk. Qantas Australian domestic terminals permit this with their Q Bag Tag and have for many years. So too KLM at Amsterdam Schiphol.
Even American’s joint venture partner British Airways has something close at London Heathrow, though theirs is “hosted” and they do require passport and visa checks frequently at bag drop. Similarly, IAG-owned Aer Lingus has Express Bag Drop where passengers place the bag on the scale, scan boarding pass, attach the luggage tag, and place the bag on the belt. Staff are still present to help first-time users. And IAG-owned Vueling does this at several stations, too. Even Delta and United are heading in this direction.
There’s really no excuse in 2026 to have passengers self-tag their bags at a kiosk – and then stand in line for an hour to hand that bag to a staff member.
I was under the impression that handing one’s bag to a live human being, whether tagged or not, was a requirement for international departures in the U.S. Wrong?
I assume they want to check ID to avoid someone buying a ticket under a false name and putting a bomb on the plane.
They also want to collect for overweight baggage.
Or… just do carry-on… *cough*
@Jon Ziomek – no, there’s no regulation requiring handing checked bags to a live human being on international itineraries. Alaska’s self bag drop is allowed for Canada and for Belize departures, for instance.
@rdinsf – for international departures there are requirements to validate documents before sending the file including those details to the government (though this can be done electronically with the passenger). there’s automatic bag drop on most flights and they manage the bag issues in the dropoff flow (and exception bags do require manual processing).
@rdinsf this isn’t 1995. All checked bags are screened now for stuff. ID checks are useless as a security measure anyway, they are only there so that airlines can enforce revenue protection. Everyone/everything is screened now.
Had a similar issue at AA / LAX the other day. This one agent was taking 5 minutes to do one self tagged bag. AA’s process for this sucks anyway. They want to scan your boarding pass. They shouldn’t need it. The bag tag code ties in with your record already. AS no longer scans boarding passes, taking a step out of the process.
@Dave — “this isn’t 1995″… (siiick burn!)
@ 1990 — Yeah, remind me why anyone would EVER check a bag?
I flew from LAX to BUF and back near the beginning of the month on JetBlue. I had one checked bag. It took almost no time to get it checked in at either end. I think the problem described is with the specific airline.
The automated bag drops at LHR, CDG, and Santiago, weigh bags and scan your passports as well, so those are not the issues here. There’s no reason the USA can’t do it.
American excels at sucking. What else is there to say?
I think Boom was the wrong word to use in this case. And why they want some human contact handing off the bag.
American lacks the money to hire more employees or fix their broken, customer-unfriendly failures because the CEO, CSuite & Board are too incompetent. They only generated .2% gross profit of $111m on a revenue of $54b – and the CEO kept 45% of those profits for himself. Your poor experience is too expensive to fix when hoarding what little profit for it’s CEO.
Have you actually used the automated Alaska bag system at Seattle? It’s horrendous. The machine glitches constantly and takes at least 15x longer than a normal human being. Alaska also has a ton of humans assigned to help with these junk machines. I’m all about automation in this space, but AS’ is not the model — hopefully they can fix these useless machines.
Never seen anything like this in Asia for premium check-in.
Must be a US thing. No wonder tourists are staying away!!
I go to the priority boarding station, never have more than 5 minutes wait, they tag my bag, and I’m off. Where the heck does this kind of wait happen? Both NZ and QF have self-tagging stations that work perfectly with rare waiting times. It can de done (and yes the bags are weighed). And, @Gene, who the heck wants to lug around 90 days of stuff instead of checking?