I am so tempted to shame the airline who broke my suitcase on a recent trip from the Europe to the US. Yet, actually considering their behavior I don’t think that it would bother them.
My suitcase was a Rimowa which is actually a very nice suitcase, I highly recommend it over some of the other brands. It wasn’t its fault that it was a few year old, which much like cats lives, should be multiplied by 7 due to the beatings that the airlines usually give to suitcases. It was unusual that I even noticed the crack in the suitcase while taking it off the luggage band, and as the airlines service desk was only twenty feet away I thought I would stop by and deal with this problem.
The suitcase was about four years old but otherwise in fairly good shape. The representative was nothing like overworked support people portrayed by comedians. He was a very nice even jovial person who should have been in sales.
When we spoke about the suitcase, as it was not a common US brand he suggested it be repaired back in Europe, and he took a look at the luggage and quickly wrote up on an official looking piece of paper that the suitcase had another tear as well as a couple of dings that I didn’t notice. His sales pitch was so good that I was believing I could simply drop off my broken suitcase at the airport in Frankfurt and it would be taken care of.
Well, once I did get back to Frankfurt I was let in for a big surprise. It seems that writing all kinds of official stuff on a piece of paper which even included the company logo, was well, nothing. Instead of entering this issue into the computer system they did nothing. The baggage people at the other end were not so friendly but they did take down all the necessary information and entered it into the ticketing system, for all the good that did.
We were then given a both a fax number and a standard telephone number that was supposedly manned about 4 hours a day. Well, the airlines never did answer this support phone number nor did they ever reply to any of the faxes that were sent.
What happened to the suitcase? Well, after fooling around with this issue for a few months, obviously with somewhat less vigor after the first month, I was forced to give up. We did use this suitcase one more time with some duct tape, but then we had to dispose of it.
Lessons learned: The airlines baggage reporting system is much like the blackjack tables in any casino in the world. It is somewhat skewed towards the house. If you have nothing but time you may be able to break even, but I wouldn’t count on it.