Anne Newman’s holiday cruise from Baltimore to the Bahamas on the Carnival Pride got off to the worst start possible when two members of her party — her brother and father — were left standing at the dock because of a paperwork problem.
No, they didn’t bring the wrong birth certificate. Instead, they had inadvertently packed their travel documents in their bags and checked them.
Newman wants to be compensated for their denied boarding, and she wants me to help her.
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Luggage fees are a quick and relatively easy way for an airline to make money, but the European discount airlines have turned it into an artform.
If your carry-on tips the scale a few grams over the limit, the price of your air transportation can routinely double, thanks to their punitive and arbitrary baggage surcharges.
Nicholas Dominick recently found himself on the wrong side of that scheme when he flew from Venice to Münster, Germany, via Berlin on Air Berlin. Knowing the airline’s strict luggage policies, he’d weighed his luggage and it added up to a total of 40 kilos.
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Like many air travelers who are wary of having their luggage pilfered, Bobby Caldwell took every step he could to protect his property on a recent flight from Albuquerque, N.M., to Chicago. He packed his belonging in sturdy suitcases and secured them with TSA-approved locks.
And it worked. Sorta.
None of his belongings were stolen. But a funny thing happened with the locks.
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Here’s a question I get all the time: Why won’t an airline cover a lost or damaged computer in my checked luggage?
My answer is always the same: because!
Well, it’s been that way since the Wright Brothers flew a kite at Kitty Hawk. Every airline contract specifically says it doesn’t cover lost or stolen electronics, among other things.
Athena Foley and her husband wish they’d never stayed at the Hotel Ändra. When they checked into the Seattle boutique hotel this summer, one of their bags was stolen after they surrendered it to the bellhop.
Foley lost $1,000 worth of items, including clothes, eyeglasses and medicine. She wants the property to compensate her for the loss. But today’s “Is this enough compensation?” case is not an open-and-shut case, as you’ll see in a second.
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Check this out: The latest luggage fee numbers, as reported by the federal government, show that the major airlines are collecting less for our checked suitcases. They haven’t returned to the early 2007 levels, which were still pretty reasonable, but well off the highs reached in the second and third quarter of 2010.
What’s going on?
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Adelle Gloger’s luggage claim may be the strangest case that’s crossed my desk. Ever.
Not only does it involve a railroad (I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a lost-luggage complaint from Amtrak). This one is also more than a century old.
That’s right. One hundred years.
The victim: her great-grandmother, Ida Strakofsky.
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