spainflyer

Good, if depressing, story about the right, royal mess here: https://loyaltylobby.com/2023/09/25/...dded-each-day/
Quotes long report from the Munich Abendzeitung newspaper explaining the chaos. Apparently current baggage handlers are losing their contract next year and so "can't keep up" with the volume of luggage to be transported. Article says LH might go the BA route and incinerate the luggage rather than try to get it to its proper destination. Depressing stuff. Hint: only hand luggage on LH!

chris63

Thanks for posting, shocking read

cfischer

sad but unfortunately quite easy to believe. Even F luggage seems to be getting lost more recently.

SMK77

Airlines rely indeed on the service providers at the airport but they are also notoriously ignorant when it comes to issues and raising them with the airport.

MUC baggage handling has always been pretty bad and whenever I picked up luggage in MUC, there were huge delays. Lufthansa regularly did nothing to speak to the airport.

I did not understand why BA burned luggage in the end and I hope for everyone waiting for luggage will be offered a better solution.

oliver2002

The 100 containers (which each have about 30 pieces in them) have been around since August when they had the 4-5 days of thunderstorms in quick succession. After a number of serious news outlets did balanced reports its AZs turn to churn out a clickbait yellow press headline which was picked up by some bloggers. After MUC has kicked out Swissport/LOSCH (they leave in Q1/24 and will be replaced by Aviapartner) LH is looking into setting up their own 'under the wing' ground handling unit in FRA & MUC. Curious what the outcome will be.

flyingfkb

I'm confused. Is the luggage lost (definition of lost meaning the airline does not know where it is) or is luggage just not delivered but still possessed and sits in some warehouse and just need to be processed?

SMK77

Are you suggesting it's wrong to flag this out? I find it pretty embarrassing that the problem is so clearly defined down to the container and the location and no solution can be found.

chris63

They are not being processed, even if there is an airtag inside the bag and you could tell them the location

spainflyer

The 30,000 are sitting in warehouses and including on the tarmac. There may well be more pieces of luggage at other airports (the 30,000 are just at Munich) but LH just doesn't know about those. So if your definition of "not lost" is "your bag is in there somewhere, we just don't know where..." then the bags are not lost. But if your definition of lost is "I've been waiting more than 30 days and LH still has no idea where my bag is" then yeah, the bags are lost.

spainflyer

This gets us to 3000. Care to speculate on where the additional 27,000 are?
"AZs turn to churn out a clickbait yellow press headline which was picked up by some bloggers." So any reporting on this fiasco, even if true, is yellow journalism? Oliver, do you perhaps work for LH or Swissport? Or maybe the Munich Tourism Board??

flyingfkb

No but if luggage is completely lost and LH does not even know where to look chances are slim to get the luggage back. If it is that the luggage is sitting around they just need to get the manpower to sort the mess out there is a chance to solve it. No one can tell me that the 30.000 or 3.000 bags have all lost there luggage tag or no address tag on them. Some might have nothing on them but definitely not all of them. So I might would help for the press or the bloggers to ask such questions. It would give much more insight.

Harper50505

I learned a couple of weeks ago that you can set off an alarm in an Airtag which will alert any passing iphone user to the presence of the bag. My OH had a bag fail to make a transit in ZRH and he could see exactly where it was, it sat unmoving for two days when he remembered about the alarm function. I don't know how well it worked but the bag was loaded on to the next LX flight to DUB and it was delivered home the following day.

I'm not an iphone user but for a couple of years now, I've always put a Tile in a checked bag - whether the airline likes it or not but thus far, nothing has gone missing but it's always quite comforting to check the bag is in the hold as you board.

ChengL

I'm really worried now, I will be flying LH transiting in MUC soon and have to check a bag with dive gear. Is staff shortage the only cause of bags not being loaded onto flights correctly?

SMK77

Luggage is not lost and manpower is required to solve the mess. Press and bloggers raise public awareness so that the parties involved start to feel the heat.

FlyingUnderTheRadar

A comment I posted (not on FT) is that it is cheaper for the airlines to pay a claim on the "lost" bag than to process it, i.e. returning it to the owner (assuming id tags are present). As such, the airlines are going that route. The only solution is to change the limits in the Montreal Convention and other rules regarding lost baggage. Until the claim cost far outweighs the return cost, checking a bag is going to a crap shoot.

FWIW, when traveling I have multiple ID tags on the outside of the bags, ID on the inside (including all flights and destination hotel info), and now Apple Tags. And like others profiled in the press when the airline failed and if my air tag showed the location of my bag I would've no hesitation flying to the destination, reclaiming the bag, then sending the airline the bill (and if necessary file in small claim court).