Delayed, damaged and lost baggage

On this page 18

1. A completely separate claim
2. The three situations and their deadlines
3. What the limit actually is
4. Delayed baggage: what to claim
5. Checked bag fees are refundable too
6. Damaged baggage
7. Lost baggage
8. What not to pack, and why it matters legally
9. Where travel insurance fits
10. Two-year longstop
11. How to put the claim
12. If the bag turns up eventually
13. Worth remembering
14. Who you claim from on a connecting journey
15. Interim payments while you wait
16. Items bought for a specific purpose
17. Sports equipment, instruments and pushchairs
18. Photograph your packed bag

Baggage is the one part of air passenger law that has nothing to do with EU261 or its equivalents. It runs on an international treaty, it has a single financial ceiling covering everything that can go wrong with your luggage, and its deadlines are measured in days. Miss them and the claim is gone, however obviously the airline was at fault.

A completely separate claim

If your flight was delayed and your bag went missing, you have two unconnected claims. Flight compensation arises under the passenger rights regulations and is a fixed sum by distance. Baggage liability arises under international convention and is a reimbursement of what you can prove you lost, up to a cap.

Do not let an airline settle both with one payment. A goodwill figure described as covering "your travel disruption" can later be presented as having resolved the baggage claim too. Keep them in separate emails with separate reference numbers and separate totals.

The three situations and their deadlines

What happened	Deadline to notify	Measured from
Bag damaged	7 days	Receiving the bag
Bag delayed	21 days	The day it was delivered to you
Bag lost	Treated as lost after 21 days	The day it should have arrived

These are short and they are strict. The seven-day damage window in particular catches people who get home, unpack over a weekend, notice a cracked shell and only write in a fortnight later.

What the limit actually is

International convention sets a per-passenger ceiling covering delay, damage and loss combined for checked baggage. It is expressed in Special Drawing Rights, an IMF unit of account, so the figure in your currency moves slightly with exchange rates — currently in the region of £1,200 to £1,300 or €1,400 to €1,500 per passenger.

Three things follow. It is a ceiling, not an entitlement: you recover what you can prove, up to that figure. It is per passenger rather than per bag, so one person travelling with three suitcases has one limit. And because delay, damage and loss share a single limit, a trip where your bag arrives late and damaged does not give you two ceilings.

You can raise the limit by making a special declaration of value at check-in and paying a supplementary fee. Almost nobody does, and for genuinely valuable items it is worth knowing the option exists.

Delayed baggage: what to claim

Where your bag turns up a few days late, you can recover what you reasonably had to buy in the meantime. Reasonable is doing the work in that sentence, and it means:

• Replacement essentials — clothing appropriate to the trip and the climate, toiletries, a phone charger.
• Proportionate to the delay and the circumstances. Two days in a city where you have a suitcase of your own clothes at a friend's house is different from two days in a ski resort with nothing.
• Actually necessary. Replacing a suit for a wedding you are attending tomorrow is defensible. Buying a wardrobe you will keep is not.

Keep every receipt and buy at ordinary prices. Airlines routinely apply a percentage reduction on the basis that you retain the items, which is an arguable position but a common one. Claiming mid-range rather than premium purchases avoids most of that argument.

Checked bag fees are refundable too

A separate and often overlooked point: where a checked bag is materially delayed, the fee you paid to check it should come back. You paid for the bag to travel with you and it did not. This is distinct from the convention claim and is not counted against the liability ceiling. Ask for it explicitly, because it will not be volunteered.

Damaged baggage

Photograph the damage before you leave the airport if you can, and certainly before any repair. Report within seven days of collecting the bag.

Airlines commonly exclude ordinary wear and tear — scuffs, minor scratches, a worn handle — and most carriers' conditions also exclude damage to wheels, handles and feet, on the basis that these are protruding parts inevitably knocked in handling. Those exclusions are contractual rather than statutory, so they are arguable where the damage is plainly beyond ordinary handling. A cracked shell or a torn seam is not wear and tear.

The remedy is repair, or the depreciated value of the bag if it cannot be repaired. You will not get the price of a new suitcase for a five-year-old one.

Lost baggage

A bag is generally treated as lost once twenty-one days have passed without delivery, at which point the claim becomes the value of the contents up to the liability ceiling.

This is where evidence matters most and where most people are weakest, because nobody photographs their packed suitcase. What helps:

• Card statements and receipts for significant items, even old ones.
• Photographs that happen to show items being worn or used.
• Original packaging or boxes at home for electronics.
• An itemised list written as soon as possible, while you still remember.

Write the list before you negotiate. Reconstructing contents after an airline has made an offer invites the suspicion that the list grew to meet it.

What not to pack, and why it matters legally

Most airlines' conditions of carriage exclude or severely limit liability for cash, jewellery, electronics, medication, keys, documents and other valuables in checked baggage. Those exclusions are generally effective.

So a laptop in a lost hold bag is frequently not recoverable from the airline at all. That is not an accident of drafting — it reflects that checked baggage is handled in bulk by many parties, and the airline is not accepting bailment of high-value goods it does not know about. The practical rule is simple and worth following: anything you could not replace, or would not hand to a stranger, travels in the cabin.

Where travel insurance fits

Baggage is the area where insurance most clearly outperforms the statutory route. Policies typically cover items the airline excludes, pay out faster, and have per-item limits that may suit expensive possessions better than a shared per-passenger ceiling.

Claim both, but expect the insurer to deduct anything the airline pays, since you cannot recover the same loss twice. The usual sequence is to claim from the airline first because that is what insurers ask for, then submit the shortfall. How insurance and statutory claims interact.

Two-year longstop

Beyond the notification deadlines there is an overall two-year limit for bringing court proceedings in respect of baggage, running from arrival or the date the aircraft should have arrived. That is far shorter than the limitation periods applying to flight compensation in the UK and Ireland, so a baggage claim and a delay claim arising from the same journey can expire years apart.

How to put the claim

1. Report at the airport and keep the reference.
2. Notify in writing inside the deadline — 7 days for damage, 21 for delay.
3. Itemise, with receipts, and total it.
4. Ask separately for the refund of the checked bag fee.
5. Say explicitly that this is a baggage claim under the convention and is separate from any flight compensation claim you have made.
6. Decline vouchers; this is reimbursement of money spent.

If the bag turns up eventually

A delayed bag that arrives after you have bought replacements does not extinguish the claim for those purchases — the loss was incurred because the bag was not there when you needed it. Expect an argument about the residual value of what you bought, and expect it to be more persuasive the more expensive your purchases were.

Worth remembering

The deadlines are the whole game. Flight compensation can wait years; baggage cannot wait a fortnight. Report at the airport, write in within the week, and keep it entirely separate from whatever else went wrong with the journey.

Who you claim from on a connecting journey

On a single booking flown by two carriers, the convention makes the claim available against the carrier that performed the flight on which the problem occurred, and generally also against the one that issued the ticket. In practice that is helpful, because establishing which airline mislaid a bag between two flights is usually impossible from the passenger's side.

The workable approach is to report at your final destination, to whoever is handling baggage there, and to address the written claim to the carrier that operated the last leg. If that airline tells you the bag was lost upstream, ask it to say so in writing and name the carrier, then send the same claim to the other one with that statement attached. Do not accept being sent back and forth without anything on paper.

Interim payments while you wait

Where a bag is delayed and you are away from home, many airlines will make an immediate interim payment or issue a small voucher for essentials at the airport, before any formal claim. Ask for it at the desk when you file the report.

Take it if offered, but establish what it is. An interim payment against a later claim is normal and sensible. A payment described as settling the matter in full, before you know whether the bag is coming back at all, is something quite different — and at the point you are standing in an arrivals hall with no clothes, you are in no position to assess whether it is adequate. Say that you are accepting it as an interim contribution towards essentials and that you reserve the position on the full claim.

Items bought for a specific purpose

A common dispute: you were travelling for a wedding, an interview or a conference, the bag did not arrive, and you bought something specific and expensive for a single occasion. Airlines argue you have acquired a lasting asset; you argue you would never have bought it otherwise.

Both positions have something to them, and the outcome usually lands somewhere in between. You improve your position by showing the necessity clearly — the event, the date, the dress code, the fact that the bag was still missing that morning — and by buying at a sensible price point. A mid-range suit bought the morning of an interview is a far easier claim than a premium one bought the evening before "in case".

Sports equipment, instruments and pushchairs

Bulky items checked separately are still checked baggage and share the same per-passenger ceiling, which is the problem: a set of golf clubs or a bicycle can exceed the entire limit on its own. Where the item is genuinely valuable, a special declaration of value at check-in is the mechanism the convention provides, and the supplementary fee is modest against the exposure.

Mobility equipment is a different matter. Wheelchairs and mobility aids carry stronger protections under disability access rules, including obligations to provide a temporary replacement and, in many cases, liability beyond the ordinary baggage ceiling. If a mobility aid was damaged or lost, say so explicitly in the claim rather than treating it as ordinary luggage, because the applicable rules and the remedies are materially better.

Photograph your packed bag

Thirty seconds before you close the case, take one picture of the open suitcase. It costs nothing, and if the bag never arrives it is far better evidence of contents than a list written from memory three weeks later.

Do the same for anything valuable enough that you would miss it, and keep the picture until the trip is over.

Questions people ask about this