We were caught out on our recent trip, should have mentioned it in my TR's! Our VS flights were UC both ways and we flew Delta 1st class internally between LAS & BOS. We each had one suitcase, medium sized Samsonited - nowhere near the 32kg limit, nearer 24kg (we weighed them at home before leaving).
At 1st class check in at LAS the agent said our checked baggage was "slightly" overweight and we would need to pay an excess weight charge of $25 each or "get" another case and pack the excess in a third case. She even said if our carry on bags were bigger we could stick the excess in those and take it as carry on. This was impossible - we prefer to travel light when it comes to carry on, ie. laptop case & small ruck sack.
We asked her how much overweight we were and if there was any flexibility, the problem was she kept quoting weight in pounds, not kg and we kept quoting kg! She said "we work in pounds here". Flexibility, other than get hold of more cases, was not an option [n]
Anyway we reluctantly paid her the $50 there & then (on VS AMEX!) & that was that.
The crazy thing is that - overall - we were well within
DL's allowancehad we used more cases. We could have checked in bags totalling 90kg had we used 4 cases, and a staggering 36kg (plus 2 laptops!) as carry on had we taken advantage of DL's carry on allowance.
Just frustrates me that if we had used the maximum allowance it would be loads more hassle for DL, ie. more checked luggage for baggage handlers to deal with and more clobber in the aircraft cabin...couldn't believe the sheer amount of stuff people took on board on those DL flights!
Have to admit it though, as much as I disagree with the policy, at the end of day we were wrong - should have read the web site first!