Take Care Not to Be Left Out in the Code

When was the last time you studied your airline ticket or looked closely at one of your bag tags? Have you ever tried to decipher the two-letter airline code that identifies the carrier you’re flying on, or the three-letter destination code that indicates where you’re heading?

You should. Each year thousands of passengers show up at the wrong airline ticket counters and, as a result, many miss their flights.

Thousands more have their bags misplaced, misrouted or lost forever because they’ve been tagged improperly by well-meaning but often rushed skycaps and counter agents. And once a bag is mis-tagged and moves down that long conveyor belt, you may never see it again.

You’d be surprised at how easy it is for the confusion to occur.

SAN’s San Diego

It’s happened to me more than once. Just recently I was flying to San Francisco on USAir. A skycap tagged my bag SAN. Had I not caught the error, my bags would have flown to San Diego instead of to SFO, the correct three-letter code for San Francisco.

A friend heading from New York to Los Angeles on Pan American had his bags tagged with LOS. Five hours later, he landed in Los Angeles--LAX. Nineteen hours later his bags arrived in Lagos, Nigeria--LOS. It took days to find the lost luggage.

Other mis-tags are common. LON won’t get you to Heathrow or Gatwick airports. Your bags will show up at London City Airport. If you’re going to Heathrow, it’s LHR; to Gatwick, make sure the tags read LGW.

BTM isn’t Baltimore, it’s Butte, Montana (BWI is Baltimore). Planning a vacation in Mazatlan, Mexico? Better make sure the tags don’t read MAZ. If they do, your baggage could get a long rest in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico. (MZT is the correct tag.)

Going to Kansas City? If your bags say KAN, you’re in trouble. They’ll land in Kano, Nigeria. The correct code for Kansas City is MCI. ALB is Albany, not Albuquerque.

Sometimes, even if the codes are correct, you can be in trouble--if they’re not written clearly. For example, IND is the correct code for Indianapolis, Ind., but if it’s misread as IMD, it may be a while before you see your bags again. It’s quite possible they’ll show up in Imonda, the airport in Papua New Guinea.

It gets worse. If you’re actually going to Papua, don’t put PAP on the tags. PAP is the code for Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

There’s an equally big difference between JSI and JSL. JSL lands you in Atlantic City, N.J. JSI is the code for Skiathos, Greece.

Few Overseas Pre-Prints

Many tags are pre-printed, but this is not always the case, especially overseas. OSL is Norway, but OSI is Osijek, Yugoslavia.

FRS will not get you to Fresno. That’s the code for Flores, Guatemala. Your tags should read FAT (short for Fresno Air Terminal).

Some mis-tagged luggage stories are legendary. A few years ago a gate agent mistakenly tagged all the bags for a charter group headed to Mazatlan with tags that read SIN (he thought that was the correct tag, as Mazatlan is in the Mexican state of Sinaloa). When the group arrived in Mexico there were no bags. A search was fruitless.

A few days later Pan Am stations around the world received a frantic telex from a confused employee in Singapore. “Is anyone looking for about 60 bags?” he asked. “We seem to be holding a lot of bags for a Mr. Mazatlan.”

If three-letter destination tags are confusing, how about two-letter airline identification codes? You’ll see them on your airline ticket, as well as on bag tags for your luggage if you have to change planes or airlines en route to your destination.

In the competitive travel business, airlines fight for these letters. Once an airline gets a code it wants, it fights to the death to keep it--sometimes beyond death.

More often than not, the major carriers get the codes they want. For example, American is AA, Pan American is PA, United is UA and Trans World Airlines is TW.

Desirable Codes

Overseas, some airlines also get desirable codes (British Airways is BA, Air France is AF), but not always. Finnair isn’t FI or even FN. Those codes represent Icelandair and SFO Helicopters. Finnair is AY. Royal Air Maroc, the Moroccan airlines, isn’t RA or RM or even AM. RA is Royal Nepal Airlines, RM is Wings West and AM is the code for the now-bankrupt AeroMexico. Royal Air Maroc? It’s stuck with AT.

Before British Airways (BA) bought British Caledonian, confused passengers lined up for the wrong flights. British Caledonian’s code was BR. It can not only be confusing to you but to travel agents trying to decipher individual airlines. For example, the rash of new commuter carriers that are subsidiaries of major airlines has resulted in a number of instances of code sharing.

Continental is listed as CO, but that designation can also mean flights on Rocky Mountain, Britt, Air New Orleans and Southern Jersey Airways. Trans World Airlines (TW) codes include flights on Resort Air and Air Midwest. And United (UA) codes encompass Air Wisconsin, Presidential Airways and Aspen Airways flights. About the only way to tell you’re on a commuter flight is that the flight number has four digits.

But what happens if you’re an airline that hates its code?

Take the case of USAir. Its two-letter code is AL, a holdover from when it used to be called All American Airways, and then Allegheny Airlines. In 1979, when it became USAir, it wanted its code changed to US. But that code was already taken--by the U.S. Air Force Military Airlift Command.

But last year when the airline planned to merge Pacific Southwest Airlines (PS) into USAir and also buy Piedmont Airlines (PI), USAir tried to get US again.

Mac Relinquishes US

It wasn’t easy. The Military Airlift Command (MAC) agreed to relinquish US if USAir could figure out another suitable code for the Air Force.

USAir suggested MC. But MC was already being used by Transtar Airlines (the former Muse Air). But Transtar told USAir it would relinquish MC if it could get TS as its code.

TS had once been the code for Aloha Airlines, but Aloha had dropped the TS in favor of AQ. TS had then been reassigned by the International Air Transport Assn. (IATA) to a small West African airline--Transports Aerien du Benin (TAB), which had operated a one-airplane service within that small African country.

USAir was about to give up when it discovered that TAB had ceased operations. And then MC became available when Transtar went out of business.

So the switch was on. The Military Airlift Command now uses MC as its code. And, on Oct. 1, USAir gets US.

Got that straight? If you’re flying USAir after Oct. 1 and someone puts an AL on your bags, you could be in trouble. By then AL could be given to an airline in Alabama, Alaska or even Albania. In that case you could be given your own five-letter code: PAWOB. That’s an industry term given to “passengers arriving without bags.”