Piled high and stretching in all directions, photographs of a growing mountain of luggage at Heathrow airport this week were the stuff of holiday nightmares.
In spaces where passengers would normally bustle, there were suitcases. Hundreds of them. The bags were clearly not being collected by arriving passengers, and equally clearly not heading for a plane. The result of a ‘complex baggage system failure’, said the airport.
It was enough to make anyone who has ever lost a bag at an airport shudder.
For of all the moments of potential stress when travelling, surely one of the worst is that sinking feeling when you step off the plane at your destination airport, only to discover your baggage hasn’t made it, too.
In spaces where passengers would normally bustle in Heathrow Airport, there were suitcases
Suddenly all those plans you had to head straight to the pool are out of the window and replaced with a dash to the shops for emergency toiletries and underwear.
It was a scenario bride Melissa Waite, 39, found herself in earlier this month when she flew to Cyprus for her £20,000 dream wedding. Some of the wedding luggage failed to make it on the TUI flight from Manchester Airport. The beauty therapist and her husband-to-be, Michael, 32, had earlier been on the verge of calling off their wedding after flights for 50 of their guests were cancelled.
Bride and groom arrived, but their luggage containing wedding clothes and outfits for two of the pageboys did not.
‘I thought the luggage would arrive within a few days, but it didn’t,’ says mother-of-four Melissa. ‘I had to travel to a shopping mall that was an hour and 20 minutes away from where we were staying — during a heatwave that had temperatures of 38c.
‘I’d spent at least £350 on wedding clothes for the boys, maybe more. And I did not know what they would wear for the wedding without their pageboy outfits, which matched everyone else. It was really stressful.
‘I started to give up at one point, thinking that the wedding was not going to happen. I was supposed to be on holiday but I was spending all my time ringing Manchester Airport, and we had to pay for new flights to help some of our guests.’
Thankfully, the missing luggage did turn up, six days later and on the eve of the wedding.
‘Our wedding day was beautiful — as nice as it could be. But afterwards I just felt drained,’ says the exasperated bride.
Travellers wait in a long queue to pass through the security check at Heathrow
Given the current chaos at UK airports, anyone planning to hop on a plane this summer could be forgiven for feeling an increased sense of trepidation.
The crux of the problem is that airlines and baggage handling companies were forced to cut staff numbers at the start of the pandemic and are now struggling to rehire to meet the renewed demand.
Should you be worried? Is a lost suitcase a lost cause? And where do bags go to when separated from their owners?
The trouble with transfers
At any given moment, as much as 236,000 tons of baggage is up in the sky, criss-crossing continents.
In 2019, the last year of normal travel before the pandemic struck, 25.4 million bags were mislaid during air travel globally, a figure roughly equivalent to 5.6 bags going missing — or being tampered with — for every 1,000 passengers.
Not surprisingly, this dipped during 2020, when passenger numbers plummeted, to 3.5 bags per 1,000 passengers, but had climbed back to 4.35 bags per 1,000 passengers last year, the most recent figures — a rise of 24 per cent.
The good news is that, according to Sita, the international IT provider to the industry which monitors global baggage handling, travellers today are far less likely to be parted from their suitcases than 15 years ago.
But if in a normal year even 25 million bags — carried by 4.5 billion passengers — go missing, the question is why?
Nearly half of all…
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