Airport question-Can you check baggage without your whole party?

[Mickeyluver37]

Ok, I know this is an odd question.....

We are looking at leaving on a weekday afternoon and making a long weekend out of WDW in September. Ideally, we would like to pull the kids out of school no more than one hour early as anything over 1 hour counts as a half day absence and they'll already be missing 2 days for the trip. So....we live about 10 minutes from the airport. If we get a late afternoon flight, would dh and I be able to go up there, wait in line, check all the checked baggage but not go through security, come back get the kids and then go back to the airport and all 4 of us get in security line? We usually fly SW and I've waited in that line longer than the security line at times. I'm figuring if we did this we'd only have to get back to the airport an hour before our flight.

 

[dcgrumpy]

I would guess it depends on how many bags are allowed per person. If for example it's 2 bags per person you could check 4 bags, but if you have more I don't think they'd allow you to check bags for people who haven't checked in.


Of course I have no firsthand knowledge, I'm just guessing

 

[salmoneous]

In general, you can't check bags for someone else (unless they have some sort of parent/kid exception I'm not aware of.) But you and your husband could check 3 bags each on Southwest (2 each on most other airlines), which I'm guessing should be able to cover the whole family.

 

[DonnaL]

I know at PHL my DH always drops us at curbside SW terminal and then goes to take our rental back (we live 2 hrs from PHL and rather than park our car at PHL we get a Budget rental from our local airport and drop it at PHL and then do the reverse for the trip home). Since we've already checked in online, I have his boarding pass with me and they've never given me a problem. However, we've never even reach the allotted number of bags allowed either. When we went this past January, there were six of us (DH, myself, our 3 adult kids and our 5 yr old grandson) and we had 8 or 9 bags for the six of us. However, when it's just DH and I he drops me curbside and I check bags for both of us (usually just 2) and again they've never questioned it, but, I guess that's because 2 is within limits for one person anyway.

 

[Forevryoung]

We've done it for international flights too- found it to be easier especially when my sister and I were younger.

Mom gets two bags and dad gets two bags and then the two kids are just carry on items... Never been an issue even when we had to get our boarding passes there (American)

 

[goofy4tink]

As has already been said....if you can pack for all four of you in the bags that you and your dh are allowed to check, then you will be fine.