Baggage Reclaim at Gatwick. How long to wait

Westin

I guess that they must give you a refund if it exceeded a reasonable amount of time. I mean, companies are responsible if they fly 3/4 hours late, I think they have to behave at the same way if this happened to your lugguage as well. Hope it make sense

Nope. They don't. Duff info.

MissingThePoint

bettiemme wrote: »

You have to complain with the company you flew with. I guess that they must give you a refund if it exceeded a reasonable amount of time. I mean, companies are responsible if they fly 3/4 hours late, I think they have to behave at the same way if this happened to your lugguage as well. Hope it make sense

Under the Flight delay compensation Ec261/2004 airlines have to pay compensation for delays in excess of 3 hours. I agree some penalty/compensation should be levied against handling agents like Swissport, Serviceair etc if baggage delays exceeed 1 hour. At worst this might make these companies "Get their Finger Out" and deliver a better service to customers.

PaulPonting

Having waited well over 1 hour for my baggage to arrive on the conveyor belt at Gatwick North from a Thomson flight I fully agree that the Handling agents should be penalised. The handling agents were Swissport but we could not find any member of their staff to obtain any information

barbaraemmerson

You really should all try flying into Brunei................
If it is prayer time you wait, and wait ..............and wait.
If it is raining, especially in the rainy season the baggage handlers will not work so you wait for the rain to stop!
An hours wait would feel brilliant!!!

WTFH

The delays are due to cost cutting by the airlines because passengers demand cheaper and cheaper fares, while the airline wants a quicker turnaround.

Go back 20 years...
A plane lands and there are two trucks for luggage and two sets of handlers. The luggage comes off the plane and loaded on to the trailers of the first truck. It then drives off and is unloaded to go onto the conveyors.
The second truck has the luggage for the next flight and is used to load the plane (using the second crew). The second truck does not need to be there waiting while the unloading is taking place.

Today (with most airlines), there's one truck, one crew and two sets of trailers - the full ones for the next flight and the empty ones for the flight just landed.
The plane is unloaded into the empty trailers, then the plane is reloaded from the full trailers.
Once the plane is reloaded for the next flight, then the truck leaves to go to the conveyors.

The airline has a quicker turnaround and lower overheads, but the passengers have to wait in baggage reclaim for longer.

Errata

First world problems - tsk.

HopelessCase

Travelled recently by Easy Jet and had only a minimal wait for our hold luggage. However earlier in the year we travelled with Thomson (handling agent Swissport) and waited 75 minutes with little information. Surely the handling agent should be fined if they do not meet a deadline. If flights are delayed over 3 hours airlines have now to pay flight delay compensation which generally seems to have the effect of better timing and less serious delays. If the same rule was applied to hold baggage then I bet the timings/delays would improve considerably. I understand 50 minutes from the time the aircraft "Docks" to the time it is put on the baggage conveyor belt is the acceptable time frame in the UK

Voyager2002

Simple solution: rather than waiting, get the paperwork for a PIR (property irregularity report) and go home. The handling agent will eventually have to deliver your bags to your home, which obviously costs them more than simply handling them with reasonable speed.

Louisdf

Voyager2002 wrote: »

Simple solution: rather than waiting, get the paperwork for a PIR (property irregularity report) and go home. The handling agent will eventually have to deliver your bags to your home, which obviously costs them more than simply handling them with reasonable speed.

Yes and go without your stuff for 2/3 days and then spend all day locked in your home waiting for a courier-fun!

Obviously_the_best

Point is though Louis, if everybody who could live without their case for 24 hours did, SwissPort would eventually have to do something, because they'd be losing so much in courier costs.