More found than lost luggage

IN TRANSIT:THE SINKING feeling travellers get as an airport baggage carousel slowly fills and then empties and then fills again without their bags appearing is one which will be wearily familiar to many people.

Some 37 million pieces of luggage went missing in air transit in 2009 and, according to an AA study published earlier this year, around 30 per cent of Irish travellers have had their luggage lost or stolen at least once while travelling abroad.

Last month a study carried out by British insurance company LV backs up the AA’s findings and indicated that nearly one-in-three people had checked-in baggage lost, stolen or damaged. It claimed that British Airways had lost more luggage than other airlines – a claim BA described as “complete rubbish”. It said there was “absolutely no evidence to suggest that a quarter of BA passengers have experienced lost or delayed baggage over the last five years”.

While the veracity of that study may be in dispute, the indisputable truth is that bags go missing – a lot. While it is a pain when it happens – why it is we’re always left wearing the most inappropriate clothes for our destination when the rest of our wardrobe goes missing? – it is also remarkable that computer tracking systems have become so finely tuned over the last 15 years that we get so many of our bags back so quickly.

Maybe instead of knocking the airlines we should be carrying them shoulder high through airport arrival halls for their ability to send us to Atlanta and our bags to Seattle and still manage to reunite us in a hotel room in New Orleans within 36 hours.

A tiny percentage of bags go missing for a lot longer than that and, typically, airlines spend no more than 90 days looking for them after which they have to pay out.

The tiresome process of claiming the true value of lost luggage is the point at which many airlines lose kudos because they make all sorts of unreasonable demands on passengers before honouring reasonable claims. Who among us can possibly provide an itemised list of what was in bags packed in a hurry in the middle of the night? And who would ever have receipts for all the items which cost more than a tenner?

MUCH OF THEworld's lost baggage that is never found ends up in the small town of Scottsboro in the Appalachian Mountains of Alabama. The town's Unclaimed Baggage Center is a huge and bizarre warehouse mall where lost luggage goes to die or at least be snapped up by canny – and sometimes ghoulish – bargain hunters.

In the region of one million items end up in Scottsboro every year and while about 60 per cent of it is clothes and the balance is made up of cameras, electronics, books, sports equipment, jewellery, and, naturally enough, suitcases, some of the flotsam and jetsam that has washed up in recent years is considerably more exotic.

A suit of armour, a mummified Egyptian eagle, a sparkling 5.8-carat solitaire diamond ring and a violin in immaculate condition dating from 1770 have all found their way to Scottsboro in recent years.

But they are the hard luck stories. The good news stories are more common, although few are as good as the one we were contacted about recently. Last year a Irish family eschewed a Christmas in their semi in Kildare in favour of a picture-postcard perfect Christmas in a log cabin at the foothills of the Canadian Rockies.

They flew, with British Airways incidentally, and made it to their cabin in plenty of time to be roasting chestnuts on an open fire on Christmas Eve. Their bags – containing all their presents – did not. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth as the family realised that while their Christmas would be white, it would be anything but merry if there was nothing to go under the tree.

Then, early on Christmas morning, when nothing was stirring, a call came from BA to say that the bags had been located and had been driven to their cabin in a blizzard and were now on the road outside. The driver couldn’t manoeuvre his van up the snow-packed drive so two of the family stole out into the snowy night as the rest of the family slept and silently brought the presents in from the cold and – just like Santa Claus – put them under the tree creating their own little piece of Christmas magic.