The weight and balance issue is applicable on long haul flights, meaning due to wind direction causing the flight to have a longer flight plan resulting to lesser fuel and passenger (together with passenger bags and cargo). Bear in mind that under the contract of carriage, the passenger and their bags must travel together, that is one of the core commitment by the airlines to its clients. There are 2 kinds of baggage separation, involuntary and voluntary. Involuntary are those cases wherein passenger had a short connection or has been rerouted resulting to bags not being transferred however this bags may or may not not be loaded since this is not the passengers fault and voluntary, passengers were earlier advised that due to some circumstances (they opted to move to an earlier flight) their bags will be separated with them and will not also be loaded. In both cases these passengers are suppose to be advised prior, during flight or upon deplaning and not after all the bags came out of the conveyor belt and having to wait for an hour waiting for nothing. CP's flight out of Caticlan were delayed for 3hrs,they have ample time to advise those affected passengers before the flight took off.
Now if the case is short runway, then CP do not have any reason to have a full flight. Does this mean that this happens everyday? There will be more security issues if the bags are travelling without a passenger, in bigger airlines this is called positive bag match. Remember the PanAm disaster wherein the passenger checked in a bag but did not board the flight?.. The plane later blew up 30,000 feet inflight.
If we will do the math, pax paid 5k but his 2pcs bags were left behind, as CP's standard, compensate him with 1k per bag so CP still earns 3k....kita pa rin sila. Delayed bags does happen, its a regular thing. As i previoulsly mentioned, all passengers must be treated equal however there will be times that you have to bend the rules, as for this case, if i see the names of barretto and santiago, i might have to think twice in offloading these bags due to their status, unless they checked in late or sa caticlan pa lang nambwisit na at napag tripan ng staff which does happen, unfortunately. Im saying this because this happened locally so im sure kilala nila yung name but in the US, who cares, there was a time wherein an ambassador who visited Manila arrived without his bag, its a late night flight so he gave a speech at malacanang the next morning still wearing what he was wearing that night.