Like the threads intertwined in a towel, sewing is stitched into Joyce Rowland’s life.
Every day, the 79-year-old suburban Chicago woman spends hours at her machine.
“It’s me, that’s all I can say,” Rowland said of her love for sewing and embroidery work.
Rowland personalizes T-shirts, towels, and the list goes on.
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“I do towels and put Bible verses on it for my friends,” Rowland explained. “I use it all the time.”
So, when Rowland booked a month-long trip to visit family in California this past December, she knew she couldn’t leave her sewing machine behind.
“I was planning on doing a lot of embroidering and doing things for the kids when I was there,” she explained.
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Rowland said she flew on American Airlines from O’Hare to LAX.
Riding in a wheelchair, Rowland had her sewing machine in hand and in its case, treating it as a carry-on bag, as she said she’s done before, with no problems.
But this time, carrying on was not an option.
“I’m at the gate and they call us to go in and they say, ‘No you can’t take that.’ and I said, ‘No, it will get damaged,’” Rowland said. “But they already had it and it was gone.”
When she landed in California, Rowland said she made an upsetting discovery: her machine was badly damaged, just as she feared would happen.
Adding insult to injury, when she flew back home, the American Airlines flight attendants agreed with Rowland’s original conclusion that the bag met the carry-on size requirements.
“On the way home, on American [Airlines], they accepted it as a carry on and that was it,” she added.
Rowland took her machine in for a repair, and when she got the bill, her stomach was in knots. The bill was just shy of $1,000.
Rowland said she immediately filed a claim with American Airlines, but then, silence.
“I wrote to them and I called them,” she said but no one responded.
That’s when Rowland called NBC 5 Responds for help, hoping the airline would reimburse her for damages.
“That’s what I’m waiting for. To get reimbursed for it,” Rowland explained. “I didn’t think it was right for them to just ignore me.”
Statistics show Rowland has company.
Just last week, the U.S. Department of Transportation published its Air Consumer Report, finding that the rate of carriers mishandling baggage increased this past February, from 191,000 reports of mishandled luggage in February 2022, to more than 208,000 cases in 2023.
Tens of thousands of bags damaged, lost, or delayed in the hands of the largest airline carriers in the United States.
Regulators say travelers whose luggage is mishandled should file air travel complaints with their office (to learn more about that, click here).
But for Rowland, good news was on the way.
Within 24 hours of NBC 5 contacting American Airlines, the airline told her it was writing a check to cover the entire repair bill.
Now, with her machine fixed, Rowland calls the experience a “lesson learned.”
“I would tell people not to bring their sewing machines," Rowland said.
No matter which airline you choose to fly with, they all have different standards when it comes to what’s considered carry-on versus checked baggage. The TSA recommends doing that research before leaving home, including printing out a copy of the airline’s standards to show flight attendants at the gate.
When in doubt, experts recommend checking in with a flight attendant at the gate before your flight is boarded, to ensure it will not be checked at the last minute.
