What happens to lost baggage

It is actually one of a traveller's worst nightmares - being the last person at the airport conveyor seatbelt and coming to that slow realisation that your bag isn't coming.

Many of these a sensation was experienced by hundreds of travellers departing Gatwick Airport previous weekend, after a system problem meant a quantity of bags destined for flights leaving the North Terminal never made the plane.

Lost luggage can be either highly aggravating or, bizarrely, kind of convenient. If the aircarrier loses your bag on the outbound flight, {if you're left with the particular clothes you travelled in, and might ending up splashing the majority of your spending money on last-minute T shirts and toiletries to handle you through.

If, one the other side of the coin hand, your circumstance goes walkabout on the way home, a problem to the service office would likely mean international airport} staff will electronically find your luggage and - if they can find it - arrange for it to be couriered to you, meaning you will likely  leave the airport vacant handed and without the duty of dragging a travel suitcase packed with dirty clothes home. After a particularly long trip, this can feel strangely just like a positive. On the other hand, the airline will not help you unpack.

Complete consumer research into lost baggage from the Affiliation} of European Airlines recommended that 85 % of bags reported as lost are returned to their owners by courier within 48 hours, meaning they are "misdirected" rather than lost. SITA claims re-union time is actually down to 36 hours.

SITA's research found that of the 21. 6million bags mishandled last year, 47 every cent went missing thanks a lot to "transfer mishandling", i. e when passengers make connecting flights, 16 every cent because of "failure to load", 15 % due to a "ticketing error", and the rest due to a combine of tagging errors, launching errors, and "airport/customs/weather/space-weight restrictions". "Arrival mishandling" made up 4 per cent of delayed luggage.

It is a tiny percentage of the mishandled bags that are actually lost. According to SITA, only 7 every cent are lost or stolen never to be reunited with their owners - up from 5. 5 % in 2014.

Source : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travel-truths/What-happens-to-lost-luggage/