Lost your luggage? You can forget about it

MUMBAI: Call it the baggage belt fear factor. Ninad Shah (20), an engineering student from UK, experienced it last week when he could not locate his black suitcase soon after landing at the Sahar international airport.
Like thousands of flyers who lose their luggage, Shah got into the nitty-gritty of filing and following up a ‘missing luggage’ complaint with the airlines.But he soon realised that rules pertaining to retrieving missing luggage are tilted heavily in favour of the airlines.
In the last decade, cut-throat competition in the skies may have brought in flat beds, APEX fares and passenger-friendly ground handling facilities. But little seems to have changed for passengers who lose their baggage.
According to the Carriage by Air Act, compensation has been fixed at $ 20 per kg for checked baggage and $ 400 per passenger for unchecked baggage. This amount was fixed long before flyers like Shah were born.
Shah, a student of Nottingham University, UK, had packed clothes, jewellery, a dossier containing 150 certificates and education loan papers into his black suitcase and handed it over at Lufthansa’s check-in counter at Heathrow airport on March 20.
That was the last he saw of it. His flight touched Mumbai the next day, but his suitcase didn’t follow. “I call up the airline office everyday, but they don’t seem to comprehend the gravity of the matter,’’ says the nervous student whose most damaging loss is the dossier containing his marksheets and the certificates.
“The compensation given is a pittance. It’s an amount fixed some 30 years ago,’’ says Shirish Deshpande, consumer rights activist.
“These are international laws and so the local consumer courts can hardly do anything in such matters.’’ Deshpande adds that the consumer courts see a handful of cases filed by disgruntled passengers, but most are ignorant about international airline rules.
A recent case was filed in the District Consumer Redressal Forum, Chennai, by Kartik Natarajan, currently staying in the United States. Natrajan has sought a compensation of Rs 1.65 lakh with 18 per cent interest for ‘deficiency in service’ in luggage delivery from British Airways.
“Most of the cases, even if awarded favourably by the consumer court, do not get resolved as the airlines usually approach the supreme court where laid-down international aviation laws favour the airline companies,’’ point out aviation sources.
While most missing luggage gets misplaced during handling, sources in the ground handling department of Air-India at Mumbai airport say that there is a growing phenomenon of baggage thieves, who travel by air. “Their modus operandi is simple,’’ says a source. “They book a ticket on international connecting flights from a domestic destination, say a passage from Delhi to Mumbai on a London-Delhi-Mumbai flight.
They land at the international terminal of Mumbai airport, rush to the conveyor belt and make away with an expensive suitcase. We caught one such person red-handed about three months back, and handed him over to the police. But no one followed up the case.’’