A few weeks ago my wife and I flew MAN-LHR-DUS. Our flight out of MAN was delayed so it turned an easy connection into a tighter but perfectly achievable excercise. We had 2 checked bags in the hold.

My wife is always anxious about her bags being there at the final destination following some pretty bad experiences (with several carriers) over the years so was already fretting about them on the flight to LHR. As we were boarding the DUS flight at LHR she decided to ask the Gate Agent if the bags had been transferred. The agent looked at what seemed to me to be an incomprehensible screen and said, "Don't worry madam, they're on". With her much relieved, we boarded and, of course, when we got to DUS we had the dreaded tannoy call to be told that only 1 bag had made it. It was delivered to our hotel overnight.

We are both left wondering how it can be that the agent's assurance turned out to be worthless so deciding what happened can only be speculation but I'm still not fully convinced that the agent hadn't simply fobbed us off the expedite boarding and couldn't actually tell if the bags had been transferred successfully or not.

Incidentally, it was lesson learnt for us about taking advantage of ex-EU savings because the following day we were flying on AB to Florida and were very happy we hadn't taken the last flight from LHR that day. We'd have had real problem if the bag could only have been delivered the next morning.