Your Airline Owes You About Two Thousand Dollars for a Lost Bag, and Twenty One Days to Say So

For checked baggage, under Article 17(2), the airline's liability is close to automatic. It is liable for destruction, loss or damage that happened while the bag was in its charge, and it escapes only by showing the damage came from something inherently wrong with the bag or its contents. You do not have to prove anybody did anything wrong.

For anything you kept with you, the airline is liable only if the damage was its fault, and you have to show that. A crushed cabin bag in an overhead locker is usually your problem. The same bag crushed in the hold is usually theirs.

What to actually do, in order

Report it before you leave the airport, and get the reference number. A property irregularity report is the document the whole claim hangs on, and getting one afterwards is much harder than getting one at the desk.

Then buy what you reasonably need and keep every receipt. Reasonable is judged against your circumstances: underwear, a shirt, toiletries and a charger on a three day trip is reasonable, and a replacement suit for a wedding you are attending tomorrow may also be. Restocking your entire wardrobe is not.

Then claim in writing, to the airline, inside the deadline, with the report number, the receipts and the flight documents. Do it even if staff at the desk told you a daily allowance is all you get. A daily allowance is the airline's policy. The convention is the law.

Three traps

The first is the connecting carrier. On a journey with more than one airline, you generally claim against the carrier that issued the ticket or the one that performed the final leg, and both will point at the other. Send the claim to both and say you have done so.

The second is credit card and travel insurance cover, which many people use instead of claiming from the airline. Use it as well, not instead. Insurers routinely require you to have claimed from the carrier first, and the two are not alternatives.

The third is the phrase valuables not covered. Airlines discourage packing jewellery, electronics and documents in the hold, and their conditions of carriage will say so, but the convention's liability for checked baggage does not evaporate because the contents were expensive. What actually caps you is the number, which is why a laptop in a checked bag is a bad idea for reasons of arithmetic rather than of rules.

Where this sits in a bad travel week

Baggage is the most survivable thing that goes wrong on a journey and the one people are least equipped to argue about, which is exactly backwards.

Our wider guidance on planning around disruption in this region is in the piece on flexible planning, and the practical habits that make the rest of it cheaper are in the practical playbook. The single most useful of them applies here: photograph the inside of your suitcase before you close it. A claim with a picture of the contents is a different conversation from a claim without one.