I was tricked into paying for a baggage fee. I have been a loyal customer for the past couple of years with dozens of flight records. I actually have not been flying with other airlines for a long time. I have been always brought the same checked-in suitcase with me for past flights with Southwest, until this flight, where the check-in counter guy told me and lectured me "The baggage was overweight for 2 pounds". I was sure that I could easily take 2 pounds out since I had enough space to put into my carry-on. Then, the trick and fraud came. He told me "The baggage is still oversized, whose size is 67 inches in total". However, he secretly offered me that "I can only pay for the overweight part and do not need to take out the extra 2 pounds since overweight is 100 USD while oversize is 125 USD." There were 30 people in the line behind me and I was left with only about 20 minutes to go through TSA. So I cannot argue. I paid 100 USD at the counter. However, now I measured the size of my baggage one more time after arriving and as shown in the picture I provided here, the size is 30.5 inches x 11 inches x 19.5 inches, which was a total of 61 inches, which perfectly falls within the requirement. I don't know why that staff pretended to be nice and "charged me only for being overweight" since I was clearly able to remove the extra 2 pounds and I offered that to him. So clearly, this is a total fraud.
Ironically, when filing the complaint to SW customer service, all the reply I got was BS: "Unfortunately we are unable to determine if the additional fees were incorrectly charged without speaking to the agent involved."
Seriously? SW customer service doesn't even bother to spend a few minutes talking with the check-in agent? The service of SW went down dramatically ever since COVID while its ticket price went up a lot!
