British Airways – January 11, 2009

On the early evening on January 11, 2009 we landed in Calgary on a British Airways flight direct from London, Terminal 5.  We cleared customs and made out way to the baggage carousel to collect our luggage.  We usually travel fairly lightly and don’t have checked baggage but with a wonderful Christmas holiday in the London and other parts of England we had checked baggage.  We took our Christmas presents for one another from Canada in Terry’s new Carhartt bag and returned home with them and other things.

We stood at the carousel for quite a long time while a friend waited for us outside to give us a ride back to Red Deer.  The bags stopped coming and Terry’s Carhartt bag, the one with Terry’s gifts, some clothes, chocolates for friends, and a few other important things wasn’t there.  It was then that we noticed at bag at looked almost identical to Terry’s still going around.  We checked the tag to be sure.  It belonged to a person with the last name of Higgins, who was on the same flight as us. The bag had Trinidad 2006 stitched on the side, was not as new but besides that was exactly the same shape and size.

We took this bag over to the lost baggage centre and explained that although our bag could have been lost or stolen it could also be possible that Higgins, presumable Mr. Higgins had taken it by mistake.  We suggested that they phone him before he got to far from the airport.  In stark contrast with the in flight service, British Airways staff were very unhelpful, saying that they didn’t have access to that information and only their supervisor could look up the information but that she was closing another flight. They gave us a business card to call back in the morning on the 1-800 number with the file number.  They just shrugged their shoulders and said that they could do nothing.  They said the customer would call and return it likely.  We had our doubts.  People working in drilling on the rigs could travel 100s of miles to their jobs.

So we filled out the missing bag forms as instructed, knowing full well that the all that was in between us and the path to getting out bag and gifts back was a simple phone call.  We would have been quite happy to go and collect it ourselves.

The alarming thing about this is that our bag potentially left the airport with someone else.  In this time of high security is that something that should be happening?  We would like help in retrieving our bag and possibly seeing changes to the way security is handled.  Does anyone have ideas about what we should do next?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.