If you have been the unfortunate victim of lost luggage, the question of where your possessions end their days surely creeps back to haunt you.
Earlier this year thousands of people witnessed their cases vanishing into the conveyor belt vortex at Heathrow’s Terminal Five, only to never see them, nor their contents, again.
At last, however, a glimpse has been afforded into where our valuables end up:
“At least I have a good one,” said Hannah Taylor as she opened a suitcase full of clothes she had just bought at a London auction which sells dozens of pieces of lost luggage each week.
She is one of around 50 people who gathered for a sale at Greasby’s in Tooting, south London, for a sale of 138 bags.
The auction house expects to get a boost from the recent chaos at London Heathrow airport’s new Terminal 5, when thousands of travellers lost their bags following technical problems when it opened on March 27.
For Taylor, a 31-year-old hairdresser, this is a first.
She travelled from Newbury, west of London, to test out a plan hatched by a friend — buy suitcases cheaply at auction and then sell their contents on Internet auction site eBay.
“It’s a hobby,” she said. “I’ve come to see, maybe I’ll get designer gear. It’s pot luck.”
Taylor had just bought seven suitcases for 213 pounds but was concerned that their contents might be more intimate than she expected.
“I thought everything was clean and folded, wrapped in plastic (but) some frequent bidders told me that you get lots of rubbish, dirty underwear,” she confided.
Around the world, some 42.4 million bags were lost in 2007 — 18.86 bags per thousand passengers, at an estimated cost of 3.8 billion dollars to the aviation industry.
Some 85 percent are reunited within 48 hours but 0.57 bags per thousand passengers are never returned home and often end up at auction houses.
Whether it is due to my general cantankerous demeanour today, I remain unsure, but doesn’t the notion of lost cases being auctioned to the highest bidder seem slightly immoral?
Had the proceeds of the auctions been destined for a charitable cause, then perhaps I would feel less smutty about Nigel from Nuneaton sifting through my vacation laundry bag.
Although the International Air Transport Association states that 100 days must lapse before lost bags can be sold, surely in cases such as Terminal Five, which involved thousands of individuals from all over the world, the period of time must be extended.
That British Airways could not coordinate the journey from the check-in to the plane does not bode well for their endeavours to unite the lost luggage with their respective owners.
[Via: AFP]
My sister had 2 flights scheduled. One from chicago to NY, and the second from NY to Amman. Only the first flight was late, and she missed the second, so the airlines gave her an “alternate” route through Munich and Rome. Along the way they lost both of her bags!
They got to Amman a week later, but hey at least she got to spend a whole day in Rome.