Finnair lost baggage
 

I used Finnair to fly from JFK to WAW connecting in Helsinki (flight AY6 on Dec. 20 and flight AY745 Dec.21). I have flown this routing before and it is popular way to get to Warsaw because it is almost always cheapest. There were about 60 people traveling this way for Christmas in Poland. We arrived in WAW with slight delay (30 min or so), and we were waiting at the baggage carousel - about 25 pieces of baggage came onto carousel before it was stopped and we were informed that this is all that came from Helsinki. All 60 people flying this routing from JFK lost their baggage!!!! I filed lost baggage claim, and was told to check by phone or internet to check status of my lost baggage. It's been 96 hours and no one (either in Warsaw or Finnair office) has any idea what could have happened to our bags - how can you lose 100+ bags? I am in touch with several passengers who were traveling with me and so far no one of us got our bags or was told what happend. Christmas without gifts and any personal items that I had in my lost bags wasn't very pleasent. Any ideas how airline can lose 100+ bags and don't have any idea were they might be?

They for sure have an idea, and the most probable place is the strike ridden Helsinki airport. You may want to visit the Finnair forum on FT for more details.

Welcome to Flyer Talk cava47 :)

Since this is a Finnair question rather than relating to Oneworld more generally, I´ll move the thread to the relevant forum.

Kiwi Flyer
OW moderator

Finnair outplaced their baggage handlers to a temp agency at the end of November. Ever since, they have had all kinds of trouble including a wildcat strike. The official labour dispute has now been settled but the operation is still a mess (it had been messy even before).

It would appear (this is speculation, not a fact) that there is a lot of confusion within Finnair and the baggage handling outfit about who is responsible for what and in addition to bags getting lost, lines of communications and feeling of responsibility have also been lost.

Ninety-six hours without any information sounds awfully bad and pretty strange. With the baggage claim check numbers they should be at least be able to tell you where the baggage is.

Hope your stuff turns up -- and hopefully Finnair does the right thing with compensation without undue trouble. Although, according to the Montreal Convention which governs baggage responsibilities, they are not obligated to give you compensation unless the stuff is delayed at least 21 days and consequently declared lost, which seems very stingy.

Finnair has an online service that should (at least theoretically) help you see where your baggage is. The service is located at: http://www.worldtracer.aero/filedsp/ay.htm.

Hope this did not completely ruin your Christmas.

Cheers,
T.

Generally, airlines including Finnair only do the bare minimum to retrieve lost luggage to save cost. Even then, most of it turns up eventually. Anyway, the best preparation for these situations is a comprehensive travel insurance including lost luggage.

+1 ^

Even though FT is supposed to be a FF forum, these above mentioned hard facts about commercial aviation transportation business are often forgotten, it seems.

Finnair lost luggage
 

I can certainly confirm that Finnair are not generous. I have recently had an Australian couple here in Lapland without their luggage. Bearing in mind they travelled from +36 degrees to -20 degrees all Finnair were prepared to offer was 70 Euros for essentials. After 3 days without luggage they then started agreeing to this couple buying some clothing but said they would only pay 50percent and they could keep the clothing. Eventually I asked them what would this couple do with warm overclothing suitable for minus temperatures, back home in Australia, and after discussing EU regulations they at last agreed they could spend 300 Euros supported by receipts.

What a wonderful system they have:-

Baggage tracing..very difficult to get through to...

They cannot comment but can supply you with a customer relations department telephone number that wait for it only works 09.00 to 12.00 if you wish to speak to a human being. Please do not expect to speak to any manager or supervisor in that department. It is simply not possible. Eventually I was able to get a call back and get something happening.

Good luck I truly believe you will need it !!

Santa

Why didn't you just threaten them to make SAS your official airline? ;)

Hi, I am in the same situation from connecting through Helsinki back to Irekand from Lapland on the 19th. The baggage tracing is useless and emails are ignored. The website is pointless because it needs Finnair to actually trace the bags for it to be of any use!

With baggage labels it must be possible to enter the barcode number and see where it was olast scanned but I cant even see this information.

I found Finnair excellent to fly but have changed my mind and will not be using them again.

I heard there is a backlog of about 2000-3000 bags at HEL as of today.

During the Christmas holidays they were operating with minimum staff but the baggage handlers returned from their holiday break today plus the contractor is putting in extra personnel. They are hoping to get the majority of the luggage underway today or in the next few days.

And it is a very poor showing indeed.

Couldn't agree more. I heard from a very realiable source that the recent events (pilot strike + the outsourcing process of their baggage handling staff) has eaten more than the all savings AY has made during the year with their cost saving program(s). This is financially very bad news for AY and they clearly misjudged the effects of outsourcing the baggage staff. Weather has played a very, very minor role in this luggage mayhem, naturally AY press department says otherwise but that's not the truth, like we all know..

True. But I would be very surprised, if the AY management ever admits this. They see themselves being the only group of AY employees that really need to be hired by the airline itself - according to them, everything else can be outsourced. :mad:

Do they even have any management currently? Where is it? :rolleyes:

I think I heard number 3600 in radio news broadcast yesterday (Monday).

When I came home AY756 on Sunday evening, baggage claim area was very crowded. Could be normal after holidays but I've never seen it like that. I got my baggage at 23:40 (landed 22:50).

And apparently grown to 4000 as of today (Tuesday) What I would like to know is how much staff there is on site for handling that mountain and if hidden industrial action is still partly responsible for the backlog?