WE ALL have a suitcase story. So often they travel much further than we do. Take my mate Mike, who arrived this week: he’s never been to Istanbul, but all his clothes have. Funny to think when you put on your trainers they’ve been where you’ve never walked.
It took a lot of phone calls and determination to make sure he got it back, which isn’t surprising when you find out that the worldwide average is that around one in 150 go walkabout. In this case, the British Airways check-in staff at Heathrow put on the wrong label; he knows he saw her do it, but she refused to check. So he arrived in Larnaca with his bar code on a suitcase of a bloke going to Istanbul and the chap in Turkey arrived with Mike’s holiday clothes. So much for high security.
It must cost the airline, and therefore us, a lot of money. The costs are no doubt passed on to the customer. The way airlines move and track luggage has stayed the same for the last 10 or so years; it involves using the code bar, but with the average flight having at least one, if not two, suitcases going astray and with the new security measures that, as I so rudely realised a few weeks ago, even confiscated my treasured pink lipstick, people are having to put more and more of their essentials into the hold. Mike, for example, had his medicines.
My suitcase story, however, cannot blame the airlines. It was totally my fault and I shall be forever indebted to First Choice holidays. It was 10 years ago, our first skiing holiday, which meant we had begged and borrowed all the gear. We were off to Mayrhofen. It was great: the snow was falling, it was Christmas Eve. We grabbed our suitcase off the carousel and onto the coach for the magic ride into the mountains; they even played Bing on the loudspeaker.
Our little pension, booked last minute, was very pleased to see us at such short notice, a fire was roaring and Tyolean gluwein awaited us: we were eager with excitement for the beginners’ class in the morning and thought we’d just test drive our togs.
Opened up the suitcase to see a very pretty, very lacy, very sexy pink negligee. Where was my bright red bobble hat with plaits? Where was the bright orange all in one ski suit from my Uncle Richard? Gone. Nicked. Substituted with Gucci and Janet Reiger.
Yep, I managed to take some poor honeymooners’ trousseau off the carousel, they were now no doubt unpacking ten pairs of second hand, borrowed ski socks. It didn’t look good. Fortunately, the resort rep, a courageous young fellow, was prepared to drive the seven hours through the night, across snow driven Alps, to a resort in Italy and do the swap. By 9am, our very own Father Christmas had arrived back and we were bedecked in our cast-offs and ready to fall over.
There is a moral to this tale and it is, mark your luggage clearly, my cheap luggage from Woollies was bound to feature in a case of mistaken identity in the line-up. It was one of my mother’s few pieces of advice to me: “Buy best the things you use most.” I hadn’t. So now we travel with parrot green Samsonite. but even so I eye jealously those cases on the carousel that are camouflaged as pandas or in Zandra Rhodes’ luminous pink.
The good news is that 24 hours later, Mike’s wayward wardrobe had returned, and about 98 per cent of lost luggage does make it back to its owners. There is an incentive for airlines to find it fast, compensation is usually around 50 euros for a day’s inconvenience. But should the case be totally lost the Warsaw Convention advises a universally applicable 20 dollars per kilo. Personally, I think, there has to be niche in the market for a company called Customised Cases Inc. – tailor made to suit our personalities, lifestyle luggage, would make the wait in arrivals a whole lot more revealing…
