Peter Jackson column

Aug 9 2007 by Peter Jackson, The Journal

THERE are some really bad hotels, but I don’t believe even a real life Fawlty Towers could plumb the depths permissible in some other sectors.

Imagine, for example, if you checked into a hotel and entrusted your bags to a porter only for him to lose them between the lobby and your room and for them to remain missing for anything between a few hours and all eternity.

Maybe he delivered them to another room; hell, maybe even to another hotel.

Imagine, further, that this happened to one out of every 35 guests staying in that hotel.

And, let us suppose that, on those occasions when the porter does succeed in getting your bags to your room, they frequently look as though he has set about them with a pick axe and sledge hammer en route.

We wouldn’t tolerate that in a hotel, so why do we tolerate it in an airline?

And tolerate it we do. It was reported last week that up to 10 passengers on every flight are now losing their bags – or rather, having their bags lost for them. Between April and June, one in 35 of passengers on BA flights lost luggage.

The news comes at a bad time for BA, which has just been fined £270m for price fixing, after admitting collusion with Virgin Atlantic over fuel surcharges while, for some reason, Virgin seems to have got off scot-free.

Personally, I’d rather see BA – and all the other airlines – fined for losing so many bags.

Forget the 1999 Montreal Convention which limits liability for lost baggage to about £800.

It should be the case that if an airline fails to deliver your luggage to the same airport, and at the same time as it delivers you, then it should be deemed to be breach of the contract it made with you when you bought your ticket, and should be obliged to refund you the full cost of that ticket.

This should, of course, be in addition to any reimbursement for the value of the suitcase and its contents.

If this was the case, we could be confident that airlines would no longer find it so difficult to ensure that a passenger’s baggage travelled on the same aircraft as that passenger.

Peter Jackson is former business editor of The Journal and now a director of Sunderland media agency Press Ahead

I’d rather see BA – and all the other airlines – fined for losing so many bags