Lost Luggage - The Traveller's Nightmare

by chris Truelove
http://www.globalbagtag.com

I am sure everyone must have had an anxious moment or two, stood at the baggage carousel waiting to see if your luggage arrives. You know that sinking feeling as everyone else picks up their cases and you are still left standing.

My Name is Chris Truelove. The idea for www.globalbagtag.com came about after just such an experience when my wife and I were travelling to Australia, Via Bali. We checked in two suitcases at London Heathrow with one of the worlds "leading airlines". On arrival in Bali only one of our suitcases came off the carousel. Luckily for me the missing case mostly contained my wife's underwear. Though for some reason she did not seem to relish the thought of three weeks without knickers quite as much as I did!

To cut a long story short the airline had no idea where our bag was, we had to give a description of the suitcase, (one of the millions of Black Samsonites circling the globe) and the contents. (Try translating Gossard Wonderbra into Balinese!) Which was apparently telexed around all the various airports, but to no avail. The best guess of the airline staff was that the destination barcode had come off the case and it was in one of the regional lost luggage warehouses, along with thousands of other black samsonites. Not exactly lost, just untraceable to the owner.

Though I can joke about it now the whole incident was most distressing at the time, and even more so when we discovered that the airline was only prepared to pay out around 211 compensation Based on the weight of the lost bag, not the actual value. They quote something called The Warsaw convention, which limits their liability to US $20 per Kg. Not much when the average suitcase itself costs around 100.

We were sat one evening (knickerless!) thinking, how this could happen in this day and age, if only there was a way a bag could have some identity number fixed onto it which could identify that bag as belonging to the owner. I came up with the globalbagtag idea. With the Internet being available worldwide 24 hours a day and no worries about different time zones, it provided the perfect solution.

It was not until I started to look into the world of lost luggage that I began to realise just how big the problem was. Of course, the airlines try not to give too much publicity to luggage problems, but in the USA the US department of transport produce some staggering figures. The latest show that in just one month over 250,000 bags were reported. Remember this is just the top 10 US airlines on domestic flights.

The most common cause of loss is a detached destination bar code. If this happens the airlines have no idea where the bag is going or whom it belongs to. Eventually the lost luggage makes its way to regional warehouses owned by the airlines where it is stored for three months. If the airline can't identify the owner; it is sold at auction, with stores specializing in buying lost luggage and selling the contents. By fixing a globalbagtag on to your luggage it enables your bags to be identified quickly and easily, wherever in the world they may be. You can enter your itinerary onto the globalbagtag database so your bags will get back to you and not just be sent to your home address Full details can be found at www.globalbagtag.com.

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