Lost, Delayed or Damaged Baggage: The Deadlines That Decide It

Everywhere else on this site, patience is the enemy and the cure is a calendar. Baggage is worse. The deadlines run in days rather than months, they start the moment you land, and missing one ends an otherwise perfect claim on a technicality.

The European compensation rules do not cover baggage

Worth saying early, because the confusion is common and costly. EC261 and UK261 deal with cancellation, long delay, denied boarding and downgrade. They say nothing about luggage. A letter demanding 600 euros because a suitcase went to Lisbon without you gets refused in one line, and that refusal colours everything you send afterwards.

Baggage on an international journey is governed by the Montreal Convention, the airline's conditions of carriage, and any domestic rules that apply. Different logic entirely: a per-passenger liability limit, proven loss rather than fixed sums, and those very short notice deadlines.

At the airport, before you leave the baggage hall

1. Report it at the airline or handling agent's baggage desk before you leave the baggage reclaim area. Leaving first makes everything afterwards harder to prove.
2. Get a Property Irregularity Report, usually called a PIR, and its reference number. Check what is written on it before you accept it, including your address, phone number and the bag description.
3. Photograph the PIR, your bag tag receipts, your boarding passes, and, for damage, the bag itself from several angles including the tag still attached.
4. For a damaged bag, do not repair, discard or replace it before the airline has either inspected it or told you in writing that it will not.
5. Ask, in writing, what interim expenses the airline will cover while the bag is missing, and what its daily limit is.
6. If the desk is closed or unstaffed, report it through the airline's own channel the same day, and photograph the empty desk with a timestamp.

Now the trap. A PIR is not a claim. It is a report that a bag is missing or damaged, filed on the airline's internal system. Some carriers treat it as written notice; many do not, and you find out which only when they refuse you months later. Send your own written notice inside the deadline regardless of what the desk told you. Ten minutes, and it is the difference between a claim and an anecdote.

The deadlines

• Damage: written notice commonly within seven days of receiving the baggage.
• Delay: written notice commonly within twenty-one days of the date the baggage was placed at your disposal.
• Loss: a bag not delivered within about twenty-one days of when it should have arrived is generally treatable as lost, at which point the delay claim becomes a loss claim.
• Bringing an action: an outer limit of roughly two years, which is far shorter than ordinary contract limits and catches people who assume they have six.

Those are the international figures in broad terms. Domestic itineraries follow national rules, which can be shorter or longer, and some airlines set tighter deadlines again in their conditions of carriage. Verify yours today rather than relying on the numbers above. Everything else here is about maximising a claim you have already preserved.

What you can actually claim

Delayed baggage

Reasonable and necessary interim purchases while the bag is away: toiletries, underwear, something to wear to the thing you flew there for. Keep every receipt and buy what you need rather than what you fancy, because an adjudicator will read the list. Some carriers publish a daily allowance; treat it as a starting point, not a ceiling, and claim what you actually spent, itemised. Add the cost of returning to the airport to collect the bag.

Lost baggage

The value of the contents, the bag itself, and the checked bag fee you paid to have it carried. Two realities to price in. Claims are settled on depreciated value, not replacement cost, so a five-year-old jacket is valued as a five-year-old jacket. And the limit is per passenger, not per bag, which matters for a family who packed communally: allocate the contents by owner rather than by suitcase.

Damaged baggage

Repair cost, or depreciated value where repair is not viable. Photograph before any repair and keep the quotation. Most airlines exclude ordinary wear, minor scuffs, protruding parts such as wheels and handles, and fragile or valuable items packed in checked baggage. Read the exclusions first and claim what survives them.

The overall Montreal Convention limit is a per-passenger cap expressed in a unit that converts to your currency and is revised periodically, so look up the current figure rather than quoting one from memory. A special declaration of interest at check-in, for a fee, raises it, and is the only way to be covered above the cap. On US domestic itineraries the liability is capped at a regulated maximum instead, and US rules also address refunding the checked bag fee where a bag is lost, so ask for it by name and check the current figure.

Travel insurance and credit card baggage cover are often faster than the airline and worth running in parallel. Do not claim the same item from both. Insurers ask for the airline's settlement letter, and airlines increasingly ask whether you have insurance.

The inventory is what wins it

A claim saying the suitcase was worth about 1,200 dollars gets settled at whatever the airline feels like. An itemised schedule does not. For each item: what it was, brand and model, when and where you bought it, what you paid, what you claim after depreciation. Attach proof where you have it, which is more often than you think: card statement lines, order confirmations, photographs of yourself using the thing.

Do not inflate. One unprovable item invites the whole schedule to be treated as unreliable, and rounding up gains you less than being scrutinised line by line costs.

Subject: Written notice of baggage claim, PIR [PIR REFERENCE], [AIRLINE] [FLIGHT NUMBER], [DATE]

SCHEDULE OF LOSS
Passenger: [YOUR FULL NAME]

When they go quiet

Run the usual clock, compressed. Day 1, the written notice through the airline's own claim form, reference saved and confirmation screenshotted. Day 8, the itemised schedule and a second notice, plus the agent or booking site if you did not book direct. Day 15, escalation above first-line customer relations with a dated consequence. Day 45, the enforcement body or ADR scheme, which bounces the case if the airline has not had its chance first.

One honest limit on the card dispute, because overreaching here is easy. A chargeback is a poor fit for the contents of your suitcase, which you did not buy from the airline. It is a reasonable fit for the checked bag fee, which you paid for a service that was not delivered. Claim the fee that way if you need to and leave the rest to the baggage claim. Overreaching on a card dispute is how a good file gets downgraded, a point made at more length in When the Airline Agreed and the Money Never Came.

Mistakes that end these claims

• Leaving the baggage hall without filing a PIR, and trying to report it the next morning.
• Treating the PIR as the claim, and never sending written notice inside the deadline.
• Throwing away or replacing a damaged bag before the airline has inspected it or declined to.
• Buying a complete replacement wardrobe on day one of a delay. Buy what the next two days require, then buy more if the bag is still missing.
• Claiming new-for-old on five-year-old possessions, which invites the whole schedule to be discounted.
• Sending a single total with no itemisation and no evidence.
• Packing jewellery, electronics, medication, documents or anything irreplaceable in checked baggage, which most conditions of carriage exclude from liability entirely.
• Assuming the family's shared suitcase is one claim. It is one claim per passenger, and per-passenger limits are worth allocating properly.

The Flight Desk at /flights will draft the written notice and the schedule of loss around your PIR reference, your bag tag numbers and your deadline, which is the sort of thing you want done quickly when the clock is seven days long.