Thai Airways Royal Orchid Plus - lost baggages in PNH

Need to share this new experience and would appreciate if anyone could tell me whether, apart from being bad customer service, this also violates IATA (or TG's own) policies.

Direct flight BKK PNH, baggage lost. Handling agent initially refuses to fill the TG form for lost luggages (without which you cannot get compensation), then informs me and other passengers that we MUST return to the airport to collect the bags as TG will not deliver to hotels or houses in PNH or elsewhere.

Many people were in transit to Siem Reap and had to postpone their flight.

I called the TG station manager (lived in PNH and used to fly out weekly) and once again he helped by:
1. collecting the bag himself
2. taking it to a bus station
3. sending it by public bus to a town 4 hours away from PNH, where I was headed (bag contained medical equipment...).
He even paid the ticket himself as TG gives NO money for this...

Obviously no paper trail.

Now, he was NICE, but this is NO WAY to deal with lost luggages. I mean, saving a few dollars for a courier? To hotels or houses? $50 for compensation for people arriving from EU?

Today I am in transit in BKK so I asked if there is a standard policy for lost baggages and i was told that it is up to the station.

I would think there might be a IATA rule?

Formally, it's been 11 days since I files the report and no one has a paper trail to trace my bag (which i have, although parts of equipment were damaged).

bad service or worse?

Hi fresco, there is nothing worse than lost luggage. It only happened once to me and changed my flying pattern for life. Now I fly business+ and have carry on only. You should write to the HO and request compensation for the lost/damaged items. TG are like all airlines in so much as you have to break through the first line of defence. So totally ignore the first response and keep sending those letters. The important thing to remember is, to know when to move on. To answer your questions the airticket does cover the responses required of an airline in regards to lost luggage and they vary from EU to US and from airline to airline. I ask why didn't the agent want to fill out a form, and my answer is that he/she was responsible for the missing bags, meaning they went back to BKK, someone didn't pull them off the plane, regards bkkrop

For PNH, I think there may be a rule (not necessarily enforced) that the pax should come to collect the bag, in order to pass through customs. When I lived in PNH (7+ years), I occasionally had luggage get delayed in BKK when I had a short connection on flights coming from the US or Europe. I always had to go back to the airport to pick up the delayed luggage.

Even with such a restriction, though, can this situation be handled better? You bet. My mother flew in on KE once and had her luggage delayed in ICN on a short connection. I was *very* impressed to see that there was an airline rep waiting for her just past immigration (at the desk between immigration and baggage claim) with a sign with her name, to tell her that regretfully her bag was not on that flight, and to give her a Skyteam lost-luggage overnight kit (toiletries and a t-shirt) and tell her that her bag would be delivered on a later flight. (They did deliver the bag to our house, but we found out later that this was against the rules and that the staff member apparently got reprimanded...)

- Michael