^ Sorry about your problems.

On the several occasions I've had delayed bags delivered to me in N. Yorks, they are flown up on the LHR-LBA domestic and collected and despatched by local courier. This has happened even when the bags were initially tagged to LHR. I was surprised (do courier companies charge cheaper rates for local deliveries?) but I suppose it makes sense for BA if so.

This was many years ago and I seem to recall that the LBA service is recent so perhaps van from LHR made more sense. He had also made a number of other stops so the route may have made sense too.

Four days and still no word. Same run around as everyone else with the Indian call center providing absolutely no information or service. They promised to send an email to LHR asking them to update the tracing…as if there is actually any tracing going on.

You think they would make some attempt to make up for it or at least acknowledge the issue in a meaningful way.

Not so sure that we should be olding HMRC to task here. After all its HAL/BA's failure to get baggage with pax to allow correct prtocols to be followed. If HAL/BA's contingency plans can't allow for compliance thats down to them. I'd be inclined to think that HMRC are making an effort to relax the rules and such should be applauded.
As a data point, my 3 bags missing since Saturday are now showing on tracer syustem as "delivery intitiated" on reading the detail it seems as if courier are picking them up tonight (2nd) at 9:00pm. We may have them by Friday I'd speculate, so that's only a week that they have been in BA's possession!:td:

I had perishibles in one of the bags, which will be beyond their use by date, assuming that bags are returned intact, what would concensus be wrt to claiming for the loss of them?

You should be able to claim for that. Just take a photo of them with their use by date visible, and receipts if you have them (or perhaps a screenshot from say Tesco) as to their value.

Good luck to anyone who checked bags on BA 218 Tuesday night
 

Strange one in DEN last night (actually this morning). I arrived from DFW around 12:30A and was walking thru the terminal towards the parking garage when I noticed maybe 100 bags out in the open by the BA counter, some three hours after BA218 had departed. The few I glanced at looked like they had LHR tags. They were all nicely arranged and tagged with a computer printout on each bag. Did someone in DEN forget to load a container on 218 tonight? Strange that they sitting out in public by the check-in counters? Looks like 218 operated normally last night, albeit with an hour departure delay. Any ideas?

http://sfo777.smugmug.com/Other/BA/i...IMG_7176-L.jpg

http://sfo777.smugmug.com/Other/BA/i...IMG_7179-L.jpg

http://sfo777.smugmug.com/Other/BA/i...G_7178_2-L.jpg

maybe bags from pax who left london without them over the last week.

been problems at LHR with baggage

I spot an LHR transfer tag and a baggage tag with green stripes (EU origin), so it looks like the bags are coming from LHR.

OK, so the LHR was on connecting bags from EU, etc. That makes more sense since some of those tags looked like they'd logged a few miles. So these bags followed their owners by a day (or more) from LHR? Strange that they were on the departure level and out in the open. I guess BA staff figured the odds of someone walking off with a bag or two were slim.

Problems still continuing
 

Flew LHR to BCN yesterday in CE, checked in at F desks over two hours before direct flight.

Got text message while leaving plane that bag hadn't arrived, despite the flight also leaving nearly an hour late.

One of our two bags arrived, had to wait over an hour for the second one. Ironically my wife's bag arrived, mine didn't and I'm the GCH :)

So still having problems.

Why is it that such baggage issues seem to be consistent with BA/T5? One hardly if ever hears about such situations in Asia like SIN, BKK or HKG.. and even at DEL or BOM. T5 supposed to be modern?

Probably more to do with the management cheese-paring on the opex, would be my guess.

There have been reports that last year HAL did not renew the service contract for the T5 baggage system with Van Der Lande who supplied and built it in the first place, but with a third party (appears to be Babcock - a huge facilities support company) who already looks after some of the baggage systems elsewhere in the airport - mostly the older systems at T1 and T4.

One would surmise that economies of scale of the HAL operation meant that Babcock could submit a cheaper quote, along with direct support from the OEM normally coming at a premium.

A common problem with third-party support is that it's often a level of abstraction between the operator and the original vendor, because the third-party still has to have a support contract with and go back to the OEM for cases that it can't solve in-house using it's own resources.

I believe that the new system at T2 is also a new Van Der Lande platform similar to T5, which I surmise would be supported by them for the first N years of it's life as part of the supply contract.

No doubt there's some interesting integration challenges going on, which maybe could have been made easier if there were fewer parties involved.

It is interesting to read that for the moment, the hold baggage screening facilities in T2 are actually done by routing the bags on a conveyor to the T1 screening facility before being screened and conveyored back to T2. Obviously made sense to someone somewhere to save a few pennies per bag moved by doing this but seems to be a method of introducing further fragility into the system.

I'm thinking of the whole "Robust Yet Fragile" theory here - a system may be robust to common problems and issues it encounters, but a change in the environment (e.g. adding a new Terminal, or changing supplier) affects that robustness.

T5 baggage system failure - 26 and 28 June 2014
 

Am flying into T5 from Palma later. Any issues with arriving checked luggage?

My new bag that I checked in for the return flight made it to BLR. My bag that went missing on Friday is still listed as "tracing continues".

Were these bags being supervised by a member of staff or left unattended?