Hi there,
For starters, apologies for the bags going AWOL. I, sadly, do know a fair bit about baggage at BA (I say sadly because it’s a field where nobody cares when it works right, and you just get shouted at if it doesn’t!), I’ll try and answer to your points in a way that kind of makes sense. Apologies in advance if I fail. - Would the crew know if the bag had made it? Nope. Without going too much in detail, the crew won’t have visibility of the systems used to ‘govern’ the baggage processes, and there’s surprisingly little being done, in the industry, to make mobile applications of a Baggage Reconciliation System.
- Why weren’t you notified? You said that the Arrivals team was, in fact, waiting for you. In this case, and I’m attempting at doing a diagnosis without even having seen the patient, what we call “Auto AHL” hasn’t worked. Two reasons for that: your departure airport hasn’t followed the right procedure, thus not creating the message that always follows from creating a lost bag file, or the system hasn’t picked up your email/phone number. Sometimes it’s something as stupid as still having the “0” in the beginning of the number and using the +44 international code.
- Why can’t BA/other carriers be more like FedEx/UPS/TNT etc? that’s where the industry is going, and BA too. However, don’t forget that there’s a big difference between a cargo company and an airline. The cargo company will, normally, have its own system worldwide, much in the same way as FLY (or JFE) is available in (almost) every airport in the BA network. Go downstairs, in the dark dingy rooms where the bags are handled, and the reality is completely different. The Baggage Handling System (the hardware) can be positively good, such as in LHR, so-so (see LGW) or shockingly bad (as in 90% of the US stations we fly out of). The Baggage Reconciliation System (BRS, ‘the software’) can be issued by BA through a supplier, could be provided by the local airport (see Chicago, or Fraport-owned airports) or could not exist, in the sense that all one can do is to peel off “bingo stickers” off the bag tags, stick ‘em into a sheet and use that as reconciliation. Assuming you have a system, the messaging coming out of each airport is of different nature and of different quality; Haneda tracks a bag even when it sneezes; Gatwick doesn’t have a scanner on arrivals. When you go to courier companies, only a handful do send out BDOs, or messages to advise where the bag is once it’s left the airport.
The industry is ripe for change, and change is happening, and change will happen, at some point, in BA as well; but it’ll take years. I recently had a conversation with a major supplier, whose name I won’t mention to avoid embarrassing, when we mentioned the need for an airline to know whether a bag was onboard, not onboard or at risk of not making it onboard, answered “You don’t need to know about it”.
All this is my opinion and not BA's.