I’m generally not a rush-rush guy when it comes to airline travel. If find it useful to take a bit of a time buffer between deplaning and entering the real-world of transfers, taxis, trains, learning to negotiate maps, figuring out where the hotel is, sorting my head out, and to shake off the stiffness of barely human conditions of international travel. So I generally check my bag. I’ve been lucky over the years, only had one rather epic mis-routing of luggage. There comes a time though when the ratio of travel time to luggage retrieval enters the realm of the absurd. Here in CPH, after an hour and change flight from Berlin, a good 30 minutes was spent waiting. Waiting. Waiting. If memory serves, during the last trip they finally just brought the luggage trailing on the flatbed carts you normally only see out on the tarmac. Just drove the tractors in, leaving everyone to climb over things and grab their bag off the cart.
Fortunately the time was well spent having a conversation on the consequences of global connections — what would the world be like if the next billion people were connected? — with my friend Noel Hidalgo (just off his Luck of the Seven round-the-world-for-free-culture trip and a tour of duty trying out being a NYC Cabbie, which might explain the Kangol), who happened to be on the same flight.
I’ve had the same experience and I never quite understood why. The Copenhagen airport seems so modern and efficient in most respects and yet the baggage always takes forever to arrive. The conveyor belts are certainly smarter than the ones at Logan, however.