For sale at auction: your lost luggage
By Charles Starmer-Smith and Richard Edwards
Last Updated: 2:30am BST 04/08/2007


Tens of thousands of pounds worth of lost bags and belongings are being sold off by airlines at auctions across the country, The Daily Telegraph reports today.

R F Greasbys holds weekly sales of unclaimed luggage

A baggage crisis at Heathrow has led to suitcases being piled up in corridors at the airport, left outside in the rain or sold at auction houses.

Hundreds of suitcases are put under the hammer every week - with clothing still inside.

Scores of iPods, mobile phones and digital cameras are removed and auctioned separately. Airlines insist that the luggage is only sold after going unclaimed for three months, but insiders at auction houses say that in reality some items have only been missing for a few weeks when they are sold.

A worker at one of the main auctioneers, R F Greasbys in Tooting, south London, said he expected record numbers of bags to arrive in coming months.

Heathrow is suffering a continuing crisis because of a chronic shortage of handlers and creaking infrastructure. Last month this led to a backlog of up to 40,000 bags.

advertisementBA has even started trucking unclaimed luggage to Milan for sorting. Figures released this week revealed that the national carrier is losing more bags than any other major European airline, with more than 300,000 failing to turn up on carousels at Heathrow between April and June.

An average of 15,000 a month fail to be traced within 48 hours, according to the Association of European Airlines (AEA).

A BA spokesman said that bags that cannot be traced to their owners are sold at auction houses after three months and the proceeds - in the "tens of thousands of pounds" every year - are donated to charity.

Liam Wilson, one of hundreds of air passengers who have contacted The Daily Telegraph this week to complain about airlines losing their luggage, said: "I find this staggering." Mr Wilson works in Saudi Arabia and lost his bags when visiting Britain last month.

Ned Sholtz, a South African, said that when the bag he had lost on a BA flight was returned to him it had been ruined by the rain. "I had a connecting flight with BA on June 29 but my bag didn't arrive. My bag didn't reach me until August 1. It weighed 35 pounds more than when I checked it in. The reason? It was soaked inside and everything was covered in mould. Obviously it had been left outdoors most, if not all, of the time." Earlier this year an auction at Dreweatt Neate Fine Art Auction Group in Bristol sold 44 lots of "unclaimed airport baggage" from Heathrow for more than £2,500.

Christine Sachett, the chief auctioneer at Greasbys in London, said hundreds of bags were sold off each week for between £5 and £50.

She said: "After discarding the bags that are too damaged to sell, we probably have 300 lots for sale in a good week."

There is no law governing what should happen to lost luggage. Under the Montreal Convention, an international agreement on airlines' various liabilities to passengers, a limit of £850 compensation can be claimed. The AEA figures for the second quarter this year showed that on every BA Boeing 747 flight carrying 350 passengers, an average of 10 people would not find their bags on the carousel.

Air France and Lufthansa, which both carried three million more passengers than BA during this period, performed better, with one in 62 passengers losing bags.

The AEA maintains that, on average, 85 per cent of the bags that go missing are traced and delivered to passengers within 48 hours.

BA attributes some of the problems to a Government restriction of only one piece of hand luggage on flights to and from Britain. Other carriers still allow two. Willie Walsh, the chief executive of BA, and other airline chiefs met Ruth Kelly, the Transport Secretary, last week in an attempt to have this overturned.

BA claims the restrictions mean 23,000 bags a day go through a system designed for 18,000. It has admitted a backlog of 20,000 bags but baggage workers claim it is closer to 40,000.

However, passengers have reported trouble contacting BA's baggage retrieval line.

Readers of The Daily Telegraph also complain of emails going unanswered and misleading baggage tracking information.

This is exactly why I stencil my name and city on the bags, add the regular name tag to the handle in a fairly damage resistant holder, and include name, address, and contact info inside the articles. Anything of value is in my carry-on.

Prepare for the worst, and hope for the best. I guess I'm just a belt and suspenders kinda guy at heart.

I have taken probably around 20 round trip flights from Paris to different African capitals in the last 2 years on Air France and KLM. Not a single piece of my baggage has been lost or delayed. Perhaps I'm just lucky. But I do avoid BA.

Somebody (CEO of BA) or at least the idiot in charge of baggage handling should be going to jail over that!

Kathi, would you please give me a PM. I have questions about booking flights to Zim next year. A rather large bunch of folks! Thanks

Always make sure you can identify your bags.
I stopped overnight in Singapore recently, and one group had my two check-through bags, one on their trolley!
Fortunately I could identify them from a distance!