British Airways turns the table, sells passenger’s luggage

When an airline loses your luggage, it can eventually find its way to a place like the Unclaimed Baggage Center in Scottsboro, Ala. — but only after the carrier spends months trying to track down the rightful owner. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work.

But sometimes airlines take shortcuts. British Airways did, at least according to Marta Callotta, a chiropractor from Long Beach, Calif. Dr. Callotta, one of the doctors for Team USA Triathlon, traveled to Hungary with a custom-built chiropractic table this summer. British Airways lost her table, and the passenger filed a lost-luggage claim.

Now here’s the thing about this table: there’s no doubt about whose table it is or where the owner lives. A large American flag is emblazoned across the front of the table, along with the words “Dr. Marta Callotta, Sports Chiropractic.” A simple Internet search would have helped reunite the table with its rightful owner.

Instead, after a lengthy wait, British Airways cut Dr. Callotta a check and gave up the table for lost. Case closed.

Or was it?

Just this week, Dr. Callotta got a call from the table’s manufacturer. She explains:

Someone from the UK contacted them as the table company’s name is also on the table. Apparently British Airways sold my table to this guy. He wanted to know how much it was worth.

So I guess my question to you is: Can they do this? If they found my table, shouldn’t they have returned it to me or does the fact that they gave me a partial check for my claim mean that they now “own” my table?

I want my table back. It is a custom table. Do you have any suggestions for me?

I contacted British Airways on behalf of the doctor, and the airline promised to look into the mystery of the missing table. Meanwhile, she’s working with the manufacturer to see if the table can be returned. I suspect there will be a happy ending.

But this incident raises a lot more questions about lost luggage than in can answer. What kind of efforts do airlines make to return misplaced luggage before selling their passengers’ property? Are they allowed to do this?

If Dr. Callotta made a claim on her lost luggage, and British Airways had the luggage, then you can’t really call her table “unclaimed.” So what business did the airline have in selling it?

I suspect there’s a much bigger story here.



  • Alan

    British Air does not even look for lost luggage! They lost mine, and I tracked it to the Zurich airport and asked that they check there. They told me, after six follow-up contacts from me, that they had conducted “an exhaustive search” at Zurich and the luggage was nowhere to be found. Turns out it had been placed in the Lost & Found at Zuirich the day of the flight, and no one had ever inquired about it! It had a large printed label affixed to it with all of my contact info, and the lost & found finally called me (in the US) 7 months laterto ask me about it!

  • http://www.ohquepasa.blogspot.com Kyle

    That’s just ridiculous. My husband and I are going to take a trip round the world for a year and we are planning on traveling with backpacks small enough to bring as carry on. There’s no way I want to deal with lost luggage when I’m going to be gone for a year!

  • Dan

    Was her phone number written on the table?

  • Rebecca

    OMG and unfortunately all other airlines are just as bad! Something that may be of help is Global Bag Tag, I hope you don’t mind me leaving a link for them, but they’re really a life saver!

  • M

    Firstly, when you buy the ticket, the fine print probably contains the luggage policy, which says a bunch of stuff about what happens if the item is lost, but probably also says that if you accept payment for the lost item, then you have released your claim to the item. This is kind of fair, because if you have travel insurance, it would have covered any additional costs beyond the pittance offered by the airline, so in essence you’d go out and buy the item new, even if it was specialised. The poster mentions “partial check”: I don’t think it’s partial, it’s probably a final payment in full for the lost item – i’m sure the luggage policy says that it doesn’t cover goods beyond a certain value, and as a consumer ahead of time you should realise this and either (a) not check the stuff in, or (b) have additional insurance above and beyond what the airline offers. I don’t really see a problem here.

  • Jimbo

    @M:

    Yay, another internet tough guy and expert lawyer telling everyone how ridiculous they are for being uspet! Awesome!

    You’re right, “M”, no one has an expectation that their luggage be returned. After all, we all know what we’re getting into when we buy a ticket, or a tank of gas, or a lottery ticket! Companies have every right to screw, use and abuse the customer at every available opportunity.

    God I hate the Internet.

  • Lisa

    Jimbo…I totally agree with your comment to M…..well, except for hating the internet…. :)

  • Europea

    BA and the new owners of Heathrow have lost control of the baggage system there, they do not have enough people to handle the volumes. The airport contracts out with an auction company which auctions thousands of items of lost luggage something like once a month. It has been widely reported in the British media that when BA loses a bag, it is increasingly likely to tell the passenger that the bag is lost forever, pay the passenger the pittance outlined in the contract, and auction the bag off. BA and Heathrow don’t have the people to track down your bag, but while it’s sitting in a hallway somewhere, someone might rifle through it, so by paying you off to get rid of you, they avoid you filing a lawsuit for theft of the bag’s contents.

  • Jerry

    BA’s luggage failures are not new. A decade ago, I flew from NY to Milan via Heathrow and my luggage was mistagged. BA kept promising that I’d get the piece in Milan, but whenever I called, “it wasn’t here yet.” On leaving Milan, I went into the arrivals luggage room and found it sitting on the floor in a large pile of luggage.

  • Richard

    Wasn’t there a recent news story about BA or BAA flying planeloads of “lost” luggage back across the Atlantic???

  • Jo

    And that’s why I’ve done carry ons for the past twenty years!

  • Ed

    I think a case can be made that if your luggage is overweight and you then pay extra for the overage that the airline is liable for more than the ammount that they claim in their documentation. Because then the luggage is no longer an adjunct to you as a traveler, but instead, they become custodians of your “shipped” package and must guarantee safe transport of it or reimburse you the actual cash value of your luggage and the contents….I’ld like to see a court case take on this subject to see how it ends up.
    Ed
    web/gadget guru

  • Richard

    They’ve found its easier to sell the luggage instead of returning it:

    http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/topstories/2007/08/27/cost-and-found-89520-19692563/

  • Beth A

    The airlines always rule, even when it sounds loony.

    It can be a two way street though.

    I had a client once, and the airline lost his one big suitcase. He thought he would get it back on a later flight or the next day as they told him.

    He was a very detailed guy, he had all his home furnishings detailed and vide taped for his insurance company in case he ever had serious damage to his home.

    He was attending a posh wedding of his only niece on a Caribbean Island for the weekend, and made one list to leave at home, and one inside his suitcase, so he could check off his items as he unpacked them.

    His flights were awful, planes were late, flight crews snippy, they lost his only suitcase, and there were no stores on this island. He ended up at the wedding in a borrowed much too large suit. He was furious.

    I am explaining this, because he seemed like a very honest man, so what happened next was out of character, but he had it with the airlines. Aware that the airlines were going to devalue everything in that suitcase by talking to them, made him upset also. He would still have to go out and rebuy his clothes at full price.

    So he retyped a list that sounded like Cary Grants wardrobe was inside and sent it to the airline. And then kept politely hounding them twice a day.

    They check out some passengers claims and he must have passed with flying colors.

    He firmly, kept after them and a few weeks later, he got a check, a very large check, the maximum limit the airline allows.

    He called to tell me about it, he was very satisfied. The NEXT day the airline called him mad, his suitcase was found. Unlike his description of the contents, the contents were old shorts, old bathing suit, old blazer, etc nothing like the list he submittted.

    In short, including the suitcase at auction, they might be lucky to net for their share about 100.00. Engineers are not always fashion plates.

    They had paid him well , since he had estimated the value of everything at about 4000.00.

    They NOW wanted their check BACK, and they would give him his suitcase back intact, and were saying they were going after him for filing a false report.

    He told them he felt from the crappy dirty plane, to the snippy crew, to the I don’t care attitude about finding his luggage, he wanted the rest of the money for pain and anguish caused by the airlines neglect.

    They did not think it was funny. And he had to give the check back. The airlines always seem to win, right or wrong.

    Even though I believe in being honest, due to the circumstances I wish I could have seen their faces when they found his old suitcase and its contents neatly packed with his check off list in the suitcase, and cross checked it in the computer with the list he GAVE them.

  • Mia

    Globalbagtag.com, the world leaders in internet based luggage tracking, has developed a RFID enabled luggage tag for tracking lost luggage worldwide via the internet at http://www.globalbagtag.com

    This is the latest innovation by the forward thinking company, which was established in 1999 to combat the growing problem of lost baggage and has sold their unique luggage tags to travelers around the globe.

  • Kathleen V.

    June is coming right up. If you purchase a telescope (or already own one) and look toward Saturn on a clear early-summers eve, you will see all of that lost luggage – traveling round and round – I believe the bags are actually the tiny “dust particals” that we see when viewing the rings of Saturn! Well those thousands and thousands of bags have to be SOMEWHERE – right?

  • http://www.longbeachchiro.com Dr. Marta Callotta

    Just to give everyone an update on the situation…First of all, BA will only reimburse up to $1500 for a lost bag …. whereas this compensated most of the cost, it certainly did not compensate fully, not to mention the hassle, lost time and trouble caused by the situation. I was very disappointed in BA and would probably not fly them again because of the situation and how they handled it.

    Did I ever get my table back … NO! As far as I know it is floating around London somewhere. The person who purchased the table would not come forward when he found out I wanted the table back. Whereas I appreciate his excitement with his “find” at BAs auction, it certainly would have been nice of him return it to the rightful owner. Bad carma!

    Dr. Callotta