You ever wonder how can a suitcase be misplaced when you take a flight?
It is something that has always puzzled me and as I lay awake and my friend's place (5am CET), unable to sleep due to Jet Lag, and expecting a call from the Charles De Gaulle airport around 7am (in 2 hours) I figured I'd write about it.
So I took a flight yesterday, a DIRECT flight mind you, where I decided to check in one single tiny light suitcase, just so I wouldn't have to carry it around, given the fact that I broke my foot 2 weeks ago and I'm still recovering. After a 7 hour flight I land in Paris, wait for my suitcase and slowly see how people start leaving while I'm still there waiting like an idiot (along with 2 more groups of people). Why you ask? Because our suitcases never made it to that moving belt. We go to the baggage claim and they start trying to locate to suitcase, when it becomes clear that the suitcase is still at Newark airport. How the fuck is that possible?
Now correct me if I'm wrong but here is how I picture how baggage is handled when traveling from point A to point B:
- You check in your suitcase with the airline
- They put a tag on it that clearly says the destination (CDG in my case) and the flight number.
- The suitcase is then carried by people under the watchful eye of a bunch of employees that make sure the suitcase is routed to the proper luggage container
- Once the luggage container is filled up (new improvement that makes losing luggage much harder than in the old days when they would just manually load each suitcase in and out of the plane), they take them to the appropriate flight and load it in.
- On arrival they take the boxes out and take them to the belt where every suitcase is unloaded.
Now SOMEHOW, in this fairly straight forward process, a suitcase has the ability to decide it doesn't wanna go and stays somewhere in the airport. Is it from people twitering or blogging instead of loading it in? People being too lazy to take it? Boxes being filled up? I always wonder, especially how can they finish loading a plane, and not notice there's a bunch of suitcases left just sitting there until after the plane has landed in its destination and they realize they have to send it through a new flight.
Now I understand that when you transit through a bunch of airports you increase the risk of getting your luggage misplaced, as you add the problem of having people manually inspecting each bag of each flight checking to see if it has to stay or go somewhere else (with the added problem of routing it to the proper flight) but I still don't get how you misplace a suitcase going from A to B directly. It almost makes me wanna have to carry my luggage to the plane myself and have them load it in front of me, kinda like when you take a bus.
But I think the worse is when you read the paper they give you after you claim that you haven't received your suitcase. If you read it carefully, you'll notice you're allowed to ask for a refund of the items you had in there if the luggage has been "lost" for more than 5 days in a row. But here's the funny thing: you need original receipts for any item worth more than $100. Now who in hell travels around the world with receipts for their suits, their shoes, their GPS, or other possible things that you might put in a suitcase when traveling?! Sometimes it's things you have owned for years and years. I'm lucky that apparently they know where my suitcase is, and they seemed confident it would arrive the next morning, so I won't have to deal with it. But if my suitcase didn't make it to the plane the first time, will it make it the second?
I guess in a couple hours I'll be able to tell...
UPDATE:
So I call the phone number I was given yesterday, an automated response system asks me for my reference number, I type it in, and a pre-recorded voice tells me: "We are sorry but we have still not received your luggage. We will call you when we have more positive news."
Fucking great...
New UPDATE:
They finally found the suitcase (2 mornings later) and will be delivering it tonight...
