When you check in for a flight and your luggage will be in transit at a city which is not your final destination a tag called transfer is attached to your case as the case needs to be transferred to another plane.

When the case is transferred to the plane on which you and your luggage will travel to the final destination the transfer tag is removed from the case prior to loading.

However on two occasions this transfer tag was not removed .....I was flying from. Cologne via Zurich to Johannesburg.

In Zurich they did not remove the tag which had the wording 'transfer'.

Therefore when the case arrived in Johannesburg it still has the transfer tag. The airport workers thought the case was to be transferred once again to another city so did not place it the carousel belt for collection.

The case then ended up in lost property as they didn't know where to transfer the case to...

These tags which say transfer should be removed once the luggage is en route to its final destination but it seems to not always happen.

It is a pain and this has happened to me twice in the last six weeks. Both times the airport workers in Zurich did not remove the transfer tag which is green in colour and placed on the case in Cologne.