Southwest passengers are still waiting for bags days after meltdown

Family members drove 10 hours from El Paso to pick her up at the Denver airport so they could spend Christmas together. Even now that she’s back in Boston, the whereabouts of the luggage remain a mystery.

“It left Boston and then jettisoned into space, I guess,” said Carrasco, 32, an administrator at a university and comedy club performer.

While Southwest returned to operating its typical schedule on Friday, an untold number of checked bags — many of which took the trips that passengers could not — remain missing. The airline could not provide figures on how many bags had been returned to owners or how many were still outstanding, but social media is teeming with complaints.

Southwest offers 25,000 points to passengers stranded by meltdown

“We are making good progress in reuniting Customers with their bags,” Southwest spokesman Chris Perry said in an email Tuesday. “Given the scale and magnitude of the disruption, it is taking some time but our teams are doing a tremendous job of sorting bags, scanning them and preparing them for return to Customers in the many different avenues we are exercising to do so.”

In interviews with The Washington Post, frustrated travelers recounted spending hours in line, returning to airports multiple times, calling customer service repeatedly, hunting around baggage areas to no avail and filing claims into the void — and still, no luggage.

“If there wasn’t so much seriousness in trying to get my family’s stuff back, I would find this to be comical,” said Rob Demske, whose Potomac, Md., family of four had their Christmas Eve flight to San Juan, Puerto Rico, canceled.

The family was told the bags would still go to the destination. Then they got word that two of the four bags were in Puerto Rico. Later they heard that two were in Baltimore. Despite repeated calls and airport visits, they still don’t have their luggage.

“I’m not optimistic, given their track record so far,” Demske said. “Nor am I overly optimistic that Southwest has a grasp of the magnitude of the baggage problem.”

We’ve lost our luggage, and our minds

For Dallas resident Candace Hughes, a third party is now involved: FedEx. Hughes’s flight to Raleigh, N.C., where she planned to spend Christmas with her fiance and his family, was canceled. So were the rest of the flights she tried to book to get there. The marketing manager never made it to North Carolina, but her luggage did.

“At first I was told that they had no idea…