DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2003 09:53:49 +0100
From: lost and found
Subject: Second bag found

we have good news for you : as we were still waiting for reply from Athens the missing bag was found at Frankfurt. There are no more Baggagetags attached but accord. to the name label it must be yours. The bag type does also match.
We are going to fwd the baggage onboard LH454/01Oct to SFO.
Best regards from Frankfurt Airport

Uwe Prager

Ia is known for its sunsets. From the western edge of the city, visitors are afforded an unimpeded view of the sun dropping into the Aegean. The islet of Thirasia lays just south of west, poking an edge into the scene.

The Lonely Planet guide to the islands warns that by 7:00 PM, tourists crowd the westernmost sidewalk in Ia, jockeying for the best position from which to view the sunset. We found this to be true… we hurried there on our first evening to find that the rest of the city had already arrived.

We also found that many of the people there had been somewhat overexposed. Greece is as famous for its sun as Ia is for its sunsets. The fact that all the mini-marts in town have display racks of sun lotion didn’t apparently register with some of these (formerly) pale western Europeans.

Standing in a crowd watching the sun set did not appeal to us — as ironic as it might sound, we didn’t come to Greece to hang out with a bunch of German tourists. We left the lobster people behind and resolved, first, to find a table for dinner before the crowd rushed back east to fill all the best restaurants, and second, to not get sunburned.

Moving back east, we found a much better way to enjoy the sunset. The red light does wonderful things to whitewashed buildings. This is one of my favorite pictures.

By day, Ia (Santorini, Greece) is three shades of blue and one shade of white. Here are two of the blues in a characteristic Greek-islands photo, the blue-domed church. This is a landmark in the center of town, and it marked our way home; the staircase descending from here led straight to our apartment.

(Well, “straight” is not literally true; to find our apartment you’d have to know which of the numerous forks to follow. I went the wrong way somewhere 80% of the time, whether because I was unsure of my direction or distracted by the awesome sight of the caldera. I got much better at recognizing being off the path by the second day.

We only got really lost the first night, and even then we’d located the Blue Sky within a minute of realizing “we should have been there by now.” The town is not very big, and the long staircases are bookended by the shopping district at the top and the Aegean at the bottom. In between, there are only so many choices.)

The flags around the church were tied off on a building across the street, and remember that by “street” I mean “sidewalk”, not that the Greeks tend to distinguish — cars, scooters, donkeys, and people use all paths constantly and concurrently, the only apparent rules being that cars don’t fit down the narrow streets, and scooters don’t handle steps gracefully.

The picture illustrates what I found so appealing about the architecture: simple lines, clean shapes, solid colors, set against a flawless blue sky.

The third shade of blue is the sea, as shown in this somewhat random snapshot from one of the stairways in town, or this shot of yet-another blue-domed church. (They’re everywhere.)

The NYC staff of Olympic Airways is eager to help but ultimately ineffective. I’ve taken to tracking down my luggage myself.

This morning I called OA’s baggage tracking office in Frankfurt, Germany. The man there was immediately helpful; he dispatched a colleague to search the “baggage bond” warehouse at Frankfurt airport. Unfortunately there was no sign of our suitcases. He promised to continue the search.

(These actions should have happened four days ago, had OA/NYC taken any action other than blame Lufthansa. The man in Frankfurt said of my file, “Hmm, this file was closed on the 22nd.” His office had no idea the bags were missing.)

Then this afternoon, a sympathetic woman from Lufthansa’s baggage tracking group called to say one of the suitcases had arrived at SFO. (She’s sympathetic because she’s endured about six increasingly anxious voice-mail messages from me.) We should receive the suitcase Sunday afternoon, seven days after surrendering it to the staff at the Naxos airport.

One down, one to go…

In the meantime, I’ve replaced the $85 power supply for my laptop. Assuming I ever get the other one back, I’m going to send an invoice to Olympic Airways.

Here’s the dark secret of airline baggage tracing: all those barcodes and tag numbers don’t mean a damn thing. If you leave the airport without your luggage, the possibility that you’ll see it again depends on luck and good will and not much else.

Olympic Airways left our luggage behind, and therefore is responsible for returning it to me. However, Olympic doesn’t fly any closer to me than New York City. So they handed off the bags to Lufthansa in Frankfurt, so that Lufthansa could fly them to San Francisco.

Any time bags get handed off like this, the risk of total loss increases from “unlikely” to “likely.” A Lufthansa rep admitted to me that most airlines, including Lufthansa and United, don’t track luggage that is being carried for a different airline. So if the bags show up at the far end, great; if they don’t, there’s not much that can be done. There aren’t any records.

Or as one Lufthansa phone rep stated, “Don’t worry — you’ll get your luggage. It will be fine. 90% of the time, there’s no problem.” 90% of the time?!

Airlines share a baggage tracing system colled WorldTracer. The promise, as I understand it, is that any airline can open a ticket, and all other airlines can read the ticket to learn the histary of a claim and effectively track the luggage.

In my experience, this system fails. For example, Lufthansa has a policy that they won’t assist customers if the ticket is opened by another airline. So, officially, I’m supposed to go through Olympic as I track down my luggage. But I’ve learned that the Olympic Airways staff is largely unable to decipher the reports in the WorldTracer system.

Also, because Olympic created the initial record, Lufthansa is unable to update it — even though Lufthansa has my luggage. Essentially this means that the information trail ends at the point where Olympic delivered my bags to Lufthansa, even though that point is two days and 5700 miles from here.

The bottom line: I last saw my luggage on Sunday afternoon. At the moment, neither Olympic nor Lufthansa knows where it is. The most recent definitive report is from Frankfurt on Tuesday afternoon. What happened after that is a matter of conjecture.

Just to recap the pain and frustration (a recent theme here on debris.com, I realize)…

I returned home on Monday afternoon, minus two suitcases and most of my clothes.

Tuesday, Olympic told me my luggage would arrive at SFO at noon, and that Lufthansa would arrange delivery. Later that day, Lufthansa told me that they did not know whether the bags had arrived, but that Lufthansa wouldn’t arrange delivery in any case because Olympic needed to pay for it.

Olympic reacted with shock and surprise, claiming that of course they’d pay for shipping if only Lufthansa would call to get Olympic’s FedEx account number. I felt like I was mediating an disagreement in a schoolyard. In the meantime I pictured my luggage spinning around the carousel at SFO just waiting for someone to steal it. The only protection I have: both suitcases are far too heavy to lift.

Wednesday, Lufthansa found the WorldTracer messages from Olypmic’s Frankfurt office, written on Tuesday afternoon, admitting that Olympic had failed to get my luggage to Lufthansa in time for Tuesday’s flight. Therefore my bags would not arrive until Wednesday at noon. I tried, again, to contact the Lufthansa baggage office at SFO, but those people only work 4 hours per day and as far as I’ve experienced they never answer their phone. But I’ve only tried to call them 30 times, so I guess I can’t honestly say “never.”

Late Thursday, I finally got some new information. Lufthansa called to say the luggage had been delivered to FedEx. I was given a tracking number. The woman could not verify that the luggage had actually arrived, but assumed as much because, basically, there was no evidence that it hadn’t. And besides she’d found a scrap of paper with my file number and a tracking number, and doesn’t that suggest the bags had been shipped?

She also could not verify when the luggage had been delivered to FedEx. Nor could she say whether it had been shipped overnight or 2-day.

The FedEx website rejected the tracking number. I called FedEx; they show 0 packages being shipped from SFO to my ZIP code. The number I’d been given by Lufthansa turns out to be Olympic’s account number.