The travellers still chasing compensation for luggage lost LAST summer!
One passenger’s suitcase went on a 12,400-mile trip across Canada and the U.S. without her...
HOLIDAYMAKERS are bracing themselves for another year of baggage chaos, after more than 26 million pieces of luggage were delayed, lost or damaged globally in 2022.
The rate of mishandled baggage doubled, soaring to 7.6 bags per 1,000 passengers, in what has been dubbed ‘the year of lost luggage’. Thousands of suitcases piled up at Heathrow in June and were nicknamed ‘baggage mountain’.
A report from Sita, an IT provider for the air transport industry, cites the number of mishandled bags as more than eight times higher for international flights than domestic ones.
Nearly one year on, many Money Mail readers are still fighting for compensation on lost items from flights taken in summer 2022.
Pauline Somers’s heart dropped when the luggage carousel stopped without sending through her suitcase last August after her flight from Manchester to London. It was the first leg of a threeweek trip across Alaska and Canada.
What the 67-year- old from Cheshire didn’t know was that her luggage had embarked on an astonishing 38- day expedition of its own.
Her case would travel more than 12,400 miles across Canada and America, before being returned to her. When it did arrive, personal treasures had been filched, including photos of Pauline with her late husband, which she packed to feel close to him.
She planned the ‘ bucket list’ holiday with her husband in 2020, weeks before his sudden death from cancer. Two and a half years later, she braved her first trip without him. Thanks to British Airways she says it was the ‘holiday from hell’. Errors by the airline derailed her plans from start to finish, with five flight cancellations, lengthy delays, unreachable support teams and, of course, misplaced luggage. Just before take-off in Manchester on August 24, the gentleman in front of Pauline asked an attendant if cases on the tarmac might be theirs and was told they weren’t.
‘When we landed it became clear they were ours and a lot of people were in tears,’ she says. In Canada, days were wasted travelling to airports when she was told her luggage would turn up. But despite promises, it was weeks after she got home before it was delivered.
It had followed her to London, Toronto, Vancouver and Juneau in Alaska, before being shipped to Seattle and returning to London.
British Airways offered her £1,394 compensation, and 10k Avios, but she is ‘appalled’ by the offer. ‘This holiday cost me more than £8,000 and from day one I could not wait to go home. I wasted so much time at the airport, on the phone and buying essentials, this barely covers it,’ she says.
A spokesman for British Airways said: ‘We apologise to our customer for the distress caused by this situation. We did everything we could to try to reunite them with their baggage as quickly as possible by using different airlines, and we apologise for the inconvenience caused.’
Airlines are responsible for your losses when hold luggage is lost, delayed or damaged, according to watchdog, the Civil Aviation Authority. But there are no rules that fix the amount of compensation you should receive.