Dear Alex,
A friend’s boss travelled with Cebu Pacific [a budget carrier based in the Philippines] for a local scuba-diving holiday. On her flight home, the airline lost her luggage containing the scuba gear. After waiting for more than two months, she still hasn’t heard from the carrier. Thankfully, I’ve never lost anything during my travels and hopefully never will. But what should one do in a situation like this?
Allan Damian, Manila
Alex replies:
Chase the airline to resolve the matter but bear in mind that getting them to pay compensation (assuming the luggage never turns up) can be a time-consuming process. The amount you receive will seldom compensate for the lost articles, so that’s why we always recommend that passengers take out separate travel insurance.
You’re lucky not to have had any luggage mishaps as this is something every traveller will encounter at some stage. If your luggage does go astray, it’s more likely to happen at a busy airport hub when it’s being transferred between flights.
Despite the best brains in the industry, this age-old problem is still no closer to being solved. According to the AUC (Air Transport Users Council), a UK air passenger watchdog: “The world’s airlines collectively mishandled 42 million pieces of luggage in 2007, up from 34 million in 2006. Of those, some 1.2 million were irretrievably lost, which equates to one bag per 2,000 passengers.” The European Commission has called these figures alarming and says it will launch an investigation into the problem.
Remember that the chance of your bags going astray varies from airline to airline, airport to airport and route to route. I don’t have statistics for Asian carriers, but European carriers belonging to the trade body AEA (the Association of European Airlines) are regularly obliged to publish statistics.
The latest figures, between April and October 2008, suggested the AEA’s three worst-performing carriers were KLM, British Airways and Lufthansa. This is hardly a surprise, since these carriers operate at some of Europe’s largest hub airports.
According to the AEA, KLM mishandled 304,913 bags during this period, which is equal to one piece of luggage for every 49 passengers. BA mishandled 444,492, or one in 53, while the figure for Lufthansa was 457,303 (one in 76).
Put another way, it means an average of five or six passengers per wide-bodied KLM or BA plane won’t find their bag on the carousel on the other side.
