Philly Airport and US Airways: sucktastic baggage handling jinx

On Friday over at my pad in an open thread I said this:

I'm packing up for the flight home tomorrow (oy, please let the Philly airport not be a hellhole).

Well...Saturday my brother dropped me off and PHL and USAir lost my bag AGAIN. Kate's arrived safely. Go figure.

Four people on my flight lost their baggage, with it either coming on an earlier flight, or not arriving at all. In fact, the USAir baggage person who took my claim said she had several on Saturday, all but one on the RDU-PHL routes. There's really no excuse for this kind of sh*tty customer service, and the PHL reputation is bad.

More below the fold, including a travel Q of the day. The big problem, at least in the case of USAir is that the terminal for the Express brand is way the hell away from the main USAir terminal. So if you check in at F, there's a possibility you could end up with a gate at C. If so, you can check in and through security at F and walk to C, where you have to go through security again, or walk to C, check in and go through security once.

I've done both and they've lost my bags twice, so I guess the peeps there can't figure out how to transport bags. And it doesn't seem to matter whether it's busy or not -- the last time it was a late flight and there were no lines.

And this time we arrived about 4 hours ahead of time (my brother's sister-in-law had an earlier flight, so we just went early to save another trip to the airport).

The airline said my bag might be on the 5PM flight and it will eventually be delivered to my house. We'll see.

Oh, and yes, despite the drop in fuel prices, you still have to pay $15/bag on USAir if you want to check it, and the airline is now charging an outlandish $2 for water and soft drinks. When the flight attendants rolled out the cart, there were practically no takers for beverages. I wonder if they give you the whole can for that price, or whether you get the tiny plastic cup with a half-glass.

Any 2008 travel war stories out there?

BTW, my bag arrived late last night. They left it on the front porch without ringing the bell. I had left a note out there as instructed (if we weren't home, then they would leave it), even though I knew we would be home all evening. WTF? Kate just happened to open the door before going to bed and saw the bag was there.