well i got back last night from mexico visiting some relatives and the one and only time i have checked my bag in in the last 10 years, they lose my luggage. so what are my options and what are the chances of me seeing my clothes again. i already filled out a form and they basically said “we’ll keep an eye out for it and we will call you if we see it.”
Did you get travel insurance?
If not, then the airline is only obliged to refund you at a pitiful rate: $9.07 per pound. Which was set in 1929 and has never been changed. :dubious: Hopefully, however, if you kick up enough fuss, they’ll be more generous.
If you’re feeling energetic, you could try phoning the baggage departments of all the other airports served by the Mexican one you departed from, and explain the situation, to have the bags on their watchlist. Although the practicality of this depends on the size of the airport in question.
[useless pointless trivia]
Not quite!
It used to be that air travel was covered by the Warsaw convention, where passenger luggage was covered up to the value of 17 Franc Poincare, each worth 64mg of gold, per killogram of luggage. This has been slightly changed, and today Special drawing rights are used instead, each worth about USD1.50. It works out as about USD11.60 per pound.
However, this has (at least in part) been replaced by a Montreal convention, about which I don’t know much.
[/upt]
Sorry, didn’t help much, did it?
Grrrrrr, I’d forgotten about that. It’s a fixed maximum of 1000SDR (special drawing rights), which you can convert here
I would keep up hope. If it went to the wrong airport, there’d obviously be no way to give you the bag at the time and they’d have to say they would deliver it later.
Usually when that happens they can tell you at the baggage claim desk where the luggage is. When it’s happened to me, they typically deliver the bag within a day.
I had a very similar experience of checking luggage for the first time in years and having it lost. The airline asked me where they should bring it when they found it (this optimism gave me hope) and I told them I wasn’t sure where I would be so they should call me. At 5 in the a.m. they knocked on the door of my apartment (luckily I was there) with my luggage. Thanks for the call. The suitcases looked as if they had been kicked all the way from Illinois to California but everything was there and it only took about 15 hours from the time I arrived for the bags to be with me again. Hope yours turn up.
Did you by any chance go through customs in an airport other then your final destination, and if so, did you remember to pick up your checked luggage BEFORE customs, and recheck it after customs?
My SO did that on a flight back from Brazil, through Miami. He arrived home, but his luggage didn’t. He and the airlines finally figured out that he had forgotten to pick it up to go through customs, and it was still sitting back in Miami. The airlines had someone collect it for him, take it through customs, put it on the next flight our way, and deliver it to my office.
I had this happen when traveling from Bugaria to Brussels. I assumed I would never see my bag again, since it supposedly got on a flight to Athens. Miraculously, it showed up within a couple of days, but minus a very nice leather coat. Since the weight of the recovered bag was less than the check-in weight, the airline paid me for the jacket.