Echoes of the crisis: air passengers around the world complain about missing luggage and bad service

Novye Izvestia has repeatedly written about the total crisis in the field of air travel, which erupted during the coronavirus pandemic and continues to this day. It entailed a reduction in flights, many hours, and sometimes many days of delay, deterioration in service, confusion at airports, and so on... Another unpleasant detail of this situation is the loss of luggage. Moreover, as it turns out, insurance companies in such cases do everything possible to avoid paying compensation to their customers under various pretexts. French resident Yelena K. describes this situation in his blog:

“Since I fly quite a lot myself, and I send and receive other people even more (the account goes to hundreds of flights every month), it turns out that I know quite a lot about the wonders of the new airport reality.

So.

In addition to the fact that it is now impossible to plan an arrival time, carriers have a new trick: they lose luggage to the ends.

No subsequent refund.

So for myself, I realized two things.

If you are flying somewhere where it is important for you to be on time, plan your departure in advance. That is, do not plan in advance, we all do this, namely, plan your arrival time with a margin.

For example, if you need to be at a wedding on Saturday, then plan to fly out on Thursday.

And then maybe you'll fly to the pie-cutting on Saturday night.

There are no guarantees either, but the probability of being in time is a little higher.

At the same time, you are flying with a low-cost airline or a respected large company - it has ceased to be important. And the direction is no longer important either: it could be a Paris-Belgrade flight, or it could be a Boston-Berlin flight. Cancellations and transfers of flights for a couple of days are now able to do everything without compensation and apologies.

The second observation - luggage began to disappear in exactly the same way, without apologies and reimbursement.

That is, putting a suitcase on the conveyor belt, you must understand that with a probability of 10% you will never see it again.

Yes, of course: he can just fly in a week. So it happened before.

But most likely he will never fly to you.

Therefore, for myself, I concluded: you can’t put things in your luggage that you will be sorry to part with. Favorite clothes, expensive creams and cosmetics, gifts - put everything only in hand luggage.

I want to clarify: I am not describing isolated cases.

And the new reality of air travel.

Although, of course, I have no official statistics on these two points.

I just think that if you are warned, then you are armed..."

In the comments, readers unanimously shared similar experiences:

- Absolutely right. We've also been flying a lot in the last few weeks, and a lot of friends have been flying to us. None of the 20 flights went smoothly and according to plan. And everyone took off with a delay of at least an hour, with terrible confusion and a constant change of gates. It’s generally scary to send the elderly and children alone. In general, airports now look like some kind of homeless people: people accumulate on incompetent gates, there are not enough seats, they lie on the floor, lose their minds from fatigue and forget the rules of decency: they eat on the floor like little animals, no one concedes anything and helps no one and so on and so forth.. I think this post-covid reality will never resolve itself, because we understand that it is also pre-covid (or pre-apian or whatever), and no one will work in services for a penny anymore. It is very sad to observe this degradation and destruction of our cozy little stables, staples and habits.

- I flew 2 weeks ago from Tbilisi to Moscow. Flight to Yerevan Fly One. From there Utair. Transfer 3 hours. Straight more than. On the eve of departure, an e-mail arrives that the flight to Yerevan is delayed by 3 hours. I swear dirtyly, change yok, buy a new ticket from Yerevan to Moscow for the late evening by Azimuth. Moving to the Tbilisi airport, I receive an e-mail from Azimuth that their flight will be delayed by at least 5 hours, i.e. in Moscow, if I'm lucky, I'll be at 6 in the morning, and I already have plans for the whole day. I scold badly. I buy another ticket to Russia by Aeroflot. They take off on time, and by the night I get to Moscow. Shrinkage in money is 20 thousand rubles (Utair could be returned, Azimut was only ready to change the ticket for any date, but it was from Yerevan to Moscow, without variations, that is, a net loss of money in my case). In 12 days I am flying back to Yerevan on a direct Aeroflot flight. I drop my suitcase. I arrive in Yerevan at 11 pm. A friend meets me, waits at the exit, I stand for half an hour with a crowd of people waiting for luggage. The carousel is spinning, there are no suitcases. It's embarrassing in front of a friend. I go to the luggage rack and naively ask how much longer to stand. A girl with a bored face lazily says: “Don’t stand still, your luggage will not be.” "How do you know you didn't even look at my boarding pass?" - Aeroflot did not load luggage on this flight at all. - "It happens?" - "Every second day, why?" Fortunately for me, the flight from Yerevan to Tbilisi was only the next evening and, having canceled 2 meetings, in the morning I dragged myself back to Zvartnots (Yerevan airport) in the hope that the luggage would arrive on the morning flight (no information was provided). Fortunately, he flew in, and in three hours I scratched him out. But half of the passengers on my flight flew with three transfers to different European countries. It seems that they will never see their suitcases.

- My daughter flew in from Canada for 2 weeks, we lost a suitcase with clothes for her and the child, we had to buy at least pajamas. Thousands of calls, they said that they had already taken them away from Ben Gurion (Tel Aviv airport) and found a carrier company, but their number did not answer. After hundreds of emails, they suddenly brought her, after 2 weeks on Shabbat, and at night she already had to return back to Canada. The suitcase is very battered and scratched, but things / all worn, not new, are in place. It looked like it was being opened. We advise everyone to only write an email, no one responds to calls.

- And also, if the luggage was delayed and brought the next day, then check the weight on the tag, it must be re-delivered and, of course, must match the original one. We were so robbed by airport workers, they noticed only when they opened the suitcases.