*** TWA - What a joke! ***

Decided to give TWA (now AA owned) some business, instead of AA or Continental. Ray Modesto at amigostours.com handled the booking to the DR. Ray got me a great price and certainly went out of his way, thanks Ray.

The pain begins...

Arrived at JFK 2.5 hrs before the flight was due to depart, plenty of time I thought.
The TWA terminal was chaos, nothing unusual about this for a flight to the DR, but today was different. TWA had decided to place a luggage embargo on the flight, hence the chaos!
The max you could check was one "approved" bag and one piece of "approved" carry on.
They wouldn't allow you to pay for any additional weight and when I asked if my second bag could go stand by, the reply I received from one of the TWA ground staff was "no problem, but God knows when it will arrive". Great customer service TWA!

No problem, I'll see if I can get a first class ticket, my two "legal" checked bags shouldn't be a problem. No such like, the embargo covered all classes. I watched one poor first class passenger pleading with the ground staff to let him carry on a normal briefcase and a laptop bag.
Forget it, rules are rules, end of story.

What gets me is that on the ticket it clearly states two "approved" checked bags and one "approved" carry on. TWA lost my business and many other peoples business that morning.

To cut a long story short, I ended up jumping in a taxi back to the hotel and flying out of Newark a day later on Continental.

Ray at AmigosTours is helping me get a refund, plus compensation, lets see...

Rob.

Just saw a news report in south florida about FAA RULE 140, if you get bumped from flight or have to wait for over two and half hours, tell the ticket agent Rule 140 and "They Will Put You On the Next Flight".

Of course the airlines don't ever mention this. I called my brother-in-law (retired 31 year AA capitan) and he said yes and it does work.

Jim

rule 140.

I doubt that would work in Canada.

JTF-2

what exactly does rule 140 mean? please elaborate thanks

please see attached:

Remember that TWA is AA now..

Hi, being flying with TWA for about 7 years, this is the first time I hear an airline placing an embargo only to one country.
TWA flights most of the islands in the caribean and none of these island are affected by the embargo, tome is a clear discrimation case that the Dominicans and tourist are faced with. Passengers that that vacations in DR, pays one the highest fare in the industry and one of ethic groups that flight the most to there home land, I seen fare to europe that are one third of the fare that Dominicans paids. Now that Americna Airlines bought TWA we will continued to see discriminations like these in the future if we the passengers (Dominicans) don't do something about. I'm not a lawyer but I'm sure there people out there that can look into this case do something about it, speak to congress, dept. of transportations, the media(newspapers), this my way of letting others know that i'm not happy with what TWA, American Airlines are doing.

FREDDY PENA.

A couple years ago, Continental used to ROUTINELY tag one bag with a pink tag on flights to Santo Domingo from Newark. That was the bag that was guaranteed to make the flight. The rest would be shipped to Miami and then by a freight carrier on to Santo Domingo, anywhere from 5 - 7 days later. First Class passengers were allowed two pink tagged bags.

This was before they switched from 737's to 757's for weekday flights in Dec. 1999. I spent many days with repeat trips to the airport, spending hours each time, to see if my luggage made it. Before the pink tag system, they would RANDOMLY select bags to not make the flight. Often, my luggage would not arrive until the day I was leaving. I posted many times on this board about these occurrances.

It seems that on these flights in particular, passengers tend to be excessively using the luggage check, right up to the two 70-lb limit, and the planes just can't accommodate such a high percentage of passengers all checking the maximum amount of luggage. We've all seen the Dominicans, each checking these massive pieces of fully loaded bags, swapping contents between bags to get each under the 70-lb limit, and checking appliances in boxes.

AA generally doesn't have this problem because their equipment is a big air-bus.

Airlines should advise passengers of this restriction at the time of ticketing.

Thanks for the heads up. I'll for sure, avoid TWA if I have more than 1 bag to check.