New York, NY – New York City’s Department of Consumer Affairs wants to make sure travelers aren’t getting cheated by airport luggage scales.
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The department is announcing the results of a three-day sweep of every luggage scale at JFK and LaGuardia airports.
It found that 96 percent of the scales were accurate.
Stop-use orders were issued for the remaining scales. Those amounted to 23 at JFK and five at LaGuardia.
Airlines were instructed to recalibrate the faulty scales.
Consumer Affairs Commissioner Jonathan Mintz said Thursday that he wanted to commend the airlines for their high compliance rate.
Many airlines charge stiff fees for baggage over a certain weight.
The next project should be to check on the accuracy of the scales in the post office. (Yes I know that this is the Feds and not the City.) I have found that scales in different post offices show different weights for the same package.
Once, departing from la Guardia with my family of five, the woman who checked us in asked us to move over to a certain empty desk, and proceeded to weigh the first suitcase. It appeared massively overweight. Then she weighed the next one – ditto. Of course I was frantic, not having an alternative suitcase to put the extra weight, and totally bewildered how could comething like that happen after having checked each case when packing. Then it dawned on me to insist on using a diffeent scale – the weights were all perfect. It was quite clear that she knew that the scales were faulty and deliberately targetted us to make a killing on overweight. Once we had finished she proceded to check in someone else on the same faulty scales – until I tipped them off that they were being ripped off. Perhaps the check-in people get bonuses for overweight charges?
As if that wasn’t enough, I was then instructed by security not to lock my suitcases, just to afix the padlocks to the zip-lugs – so that security could open them if they saw something suspicioius inside…. Thankfully I didn’t have anything of value inside.
Last time I’ll ever travel AA.