If you’re traveling through Orlando International Airport soon via Spirit Airlines, you might be in for quite the ordeal if you’re not prepared!
©Spirit Airlines
While we’re usually fans of Spirit Airlines and their budget-conscious fares, we’ve recently seen these companies pulling routes to Orlando. To make things worse, we encountered a MAJOR problem with one of Spirit’s most recent changes to their baggage process that you’ll want to be aware of before it becomes an issue for you, too!
Spirit Airlines recently made a HUGE change to their baggage check-in system that was intended to make dropping off your bag easier and more efficient. According to Fox 35, this new process involves several self-service machines that passengers could walk up to and experience an expedited check-in that the company estimated would take around 70 seconds. They hoped the new baggage system process would help its passengers move on to security quicker since they wouldn’t need to stop to check in with an agent at the airport.
©Spirit Airlines
So, while we’ve known about this change for a while it hasn’t seemed to be much of an issue… when it works. However, on our recent trip using Spirit Airlines and this baggage machine drop-off system, this was not our experience. Here’s how this experience is supposed to work:
- Check-in at the kiosk
- Tag your own bag
- Proceed to the self-bag drop machine
- Scan your boarding pass
- Scan your ID
- The bag machine compares the photo ID scan with a facial scan and compares ID information with your flight details
- Once the match is successful, you’ll put your bag on the conveyor belt attached to the machine (which scans the bag, weighs it, and then accepts payment for any additional services)
- You’re free to move on to security. Your bags are then sent to the airport’s checked baggage system
Spirit has said that none of the data it collects during this process is shared with any government agencies. Passengers weary of this part of the process can opt out of the biometric photo-matching technology and choose to work with an agent if they would rather. It sounds simple enough, right?
©Spirit Airlines
Here’s a breakdown of how our recent experience went when this baggage system was down! Although we were near the front of the line, it took us upwards of around 40 minutes just to wait our turn to drop off our bags in the completely user-operated machines. At MCO, Spirit has replaced almost every desk with this system and only a handful of the machines were working during our fiasco.
©Spirit Airlines
We hope this issue won’t be an ongoing occurrence and recognize what a nightmare this can be to those who aren’t as familiar with flying as we are. If you’re planning on flying through MCO soon and using Spirit Airlines, it might be beneficial to plan ahead and allow for more time at the airport in case this issue is still ongoing when you’re trying to check in for your flight and get to security. Hopefully, Spirit Airlines will also recognize the problem and remedy the situation as quickly as possible!
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We had the worst experience with that system back in March. It wouldn’t scan my husband’s ID for some reason. It just kept giving us an error message, but nothing specific as to what was wrong. We tried and tried. There was no one around to help us as they had sent us down to the very last machine and all the floating employees were at the other end. I finally had walk back to the front and get someone to help us. They couldn’t get it to scan either so they just typed in something to override it. Doesn’t that make you feel secure? 😳
We were traveling with our son and his girlfriend. They just had carryons so got to skip all of that mess. But his girlfriend didn’t have pre-check so they had to get in the very long regular TSA line (husband and I went through pre-check). Even so, they still beat us to the gate by about 10 minutes. That baggage system is horrible.
Ugh yes. We are familiar with the limitations of flying Spirit, and are generally ok with them.
But the luggage checking process at MCO is HORRIBLE. Those machines are NOT ready for prime time.
British Airways uses these at Heathrow airport and it took us forever and they finally had to send an agent over because it kept saying our bag was overweight but it wasn’t, it kept trying to get us to pay the fee. The agent was able to check it and as we knew it wasn’t over so these machines can also make mistakes and charge you fees you don’t owe.