My successful delayed baggage claim through American Airlines and Chase
/On December 24, 2024, American Airlines suffered a nationwide groundstop which naturally resulted in a series of delays. My partner and I were scheduled on a short nonstop flight in the morning that ultimately arrived in the early evening. No sooner did I regain cell service than I received a text message and e-mail from American stating that both our checked bags were delayed.
We went to the baggage claim office and filled out the standard forms. I asked the woman minding the store whether we should expect the bags that night, and she said the last courier had already been dispatched so we wouldn’t receive them until the next day. So, we headed out to celebrate Christmas Eve.
I’ve had delayed bags before and was annoyed, but not worried. Carriers at large airports have contracts with local couriers to deliver bags, and we were only going to be 70 minutes or so away from the airport. I was also happy with the regular updates I was getting from American (the bags arrived at the airport on the next flight a few hours later, which obviously would have been good information to have in advance) and then later in the evening from FedEx saying that the shipping label had been created and that delivery was expected on December 26.
That didn’t happen. The bags sat at the airport until December 27, when we apparently passed them like ships in the night on our way for our next flight: we were going to Oregon for 10 days and still didn’t have any clothes but the ones on our backs. At that point, I said, “I’m on vacation, I’m not worrying about this, let’s replace everything.”
So when we arrived in Oregon, we headed to REI and did exactly that. For those who don’t remember the pivotal scene from 2014’s “Wild,” REI has a very generous return policy: almost everything they sell can be returned for a cash refund. We have an REI back home as well, so my logic was simple: spend as much money as we want replacing our stuff, and return anything that doesn’t get reimbursed by American Airlines and Chase, the issuer of the credit card I used to pay the $36.20 in taxes and fees on our award tickets.
Ultimately, between the two I was reimbursed for everything barely a month later.
Chase Ink baggage delay insurance
Like most such benefits, Chase’s baggage delay benefit is administered by a third party, in this case Assurant. To find out if your Chase credit card offers this benefit, you can navigate to “Card Benefits” from a dropdown menu on your Chase dashboard by clicking the three dots next to each card listed.
If your card has a baggage delay insurance benefit, you should see this tile or one like it once you select the “Travel” category:
My personal World of Hyatt Visa card and business Ink Plus and Ink Preferred Visa cards have this benefit (identical in all three cases) but my personal Freedom Unlimited Visa and my Freedom Flex MasterCards do not.
For a trip to qualify for the benefit, you must pay for the entire cash cost of the flight with the eligible card, whether that’s the cash fare on a paid flight or the taxes and fees on an award flight.
After settling in on the Oregon coast, I set up my account with Assurant and initiated my claim. I was able to do this entirely on my phone, although it probably would have been slightly easier on a PC.
I was able to initiate my claim without providing any documentation yet, since I wasn’t sure what they would ultimately need, and in these circumstances it’s always better to know exactly what they’re going to ask for so you don’t provide too much, too little, or too conflicting information.
Assurant’s document request
Later on the evening of December 27, I received an e-mail from Assurant with a linked document thanking me for my claim and providing a list of documents to submit:
“To avoid processing delays, please provide the following documents within 15 days:
“A copy of the settlement payment or denial of payment from the Common Carrier claim (such as planes, trains and cruise ships)
“Itemized Receipts for the essential items you purchased
“Your Card Account Statement (showing the last four (4) digits of the Account number) demonstrating that the payment for the Trip was made on your Covered Card and/or with redeemable Rewards
“Your Travel Itinerary
“Documentation from the Common Carrier (such as planes, trains and cruise ships) indicating your baggage was delayed”
To make life as easy as possible for my claim manager, I titled each of these documents precisely as asked, and uploaded all of them but the first (my American Airlines settlement) on December 31:
On January 8 and 12, 2025, I received identical e-mails requesting the first, missing document again, which of course I still did not have.
American Airlines delayed baggage reimbursement
The reason Chase needed this final document is that, as you’d expect, credit card baggage delay insurance is always or almost always “secondary” to the reimbursement you receive from your common carrier for the same delayed baggage “event.”
However, this raised another question without an obvious answer: if the Chase baggage delay insurance is limited to $100 per day, for up to 5 days, would that $500 per passenger cap be applied before or after deducting the amount of reimbursement I receive from American? In other words, would receiving $500 in reimbursement from American “exhaust” my Chase baggage delay insurance without Chase having to pay me a thing? Fortunately, that didn’t turn out to be the case.
To apply for reimbursement from American, I navigated to this page, then expanded the “What happens next?” pane to reveal the buried “Submit a claim” button. Here, I provided the exact same information Chase required, plus photos of my baggage claim tags.
I submitted my claim on January 7, and on January 16 received an e-mail with the subject line “American Airlines Central Baggage Resolution.”
The e-mail took an oddly snarky tone, violating what seems to me one of the first principles of brand management, or even communication: if you’re doing someone a favor in order to create goodwill, don’t make a big show of how generous you’re being. The e-mail read in relevant part:
“We're reimbursing you in the amount of $9xx.xx for clothes and toiletries. Please note, that some clothes aren’t covered, because the clothes were purchased after you received the bags, the bags were delivered on December 27, 2024, at 11:25 am. We are making an exception to reimburse you for the items that are considered reasonable.”
As I explained above, the baggage was delivered after we had already left the state they were delivered to. From our perspective, the baggage was still delayed until we finally received it in Oregon on January 4, while from American’s perspective, they had already fulfilled their obligations on the morning of December 27.
I can see both perspectives, but rather than simply take credit for the gesture of good will, they decided to rub their “generosity” in my face, despite being the responsible party for the entire situation in the first place. As I said, this strikes me as an unforced error.
I received the check on January 27.
Back to Chase
With my settlement letter in hand, I uploaded it to the Chase portal on January 16, 2025. On January 24 I received an e-mail linking to the approval of my claim for the full amount of our expenses, minus the $9xx.xx paid by American. The next day I received an e-mail to register for Assurant’s payment portal (separate from the claim portal) and received an ACH for the amount due on January 27.
Conclusion and lessons learned
To get the obvious out of the way, this is an incredibly valuable credit card benefit, and I’ll never book a flight with a credit card that doesn’t offer it again. I spent over $1,000 on high-quality clothes and got every penny of it back — and I still got to keep the clothes!
On a more fundamental level, one of the sources of my stress was exactly the issue that American pointed to in their approval of my claim: on multi-leg Alaska Mileage Plan trips like this, I almost always book each leg as a separate ticket, since Alaska prices out awards as one-ways anyway. That meant neither American nor Alaska was correctly “tracking” us across the country. On future trips where I know I’ll be checking bags, I might work harder at getting each leg onto a single reservation.
But ultimately, this is a story about the need for two things: urgency and documentation.
The second your bag is delayed, you have permission to go shopping, and I suggest you take it immediately. I do a lot of my shopping at REI anyway, but picking any store with a generous return policy is a good way to give yourself “permission” to buy everything you really want or need. Replace your electric toothbrush (now I have a travel toothbrush and a home toothbrush). Buy your favorite brand of underwear (now I have a LOT of boxer briefs). Get a new raincoat.
And keep everything. I even filled up the little bag Hanes underwear comes in with the tags and labels from all the stuff we bought, just in case. A lot of the ink on receipt paper and baggage claim tags fades within a day or two, so scan or take pictures of them immediately. Do it in the parking lot. The e-mailed receipt from REI conveniently included images of the items we bought, which made it even easier to print that to a file I could submit online. Find and download the credit card statement your original ticket purchase appeared on.
And remember: they’re the ones who screwed up. Your’re not taking advantage of them, you’re being made whole.
