The belt stops moving and your bag is not on it. The other passengers have gone. You are standing in the arrivals hall with a boarding pass and a trolley. This is the moment a lost luggage claim is won or lost, because what you do in the next twenty minutes decides how much leverage you have three weeks from now.
Airlines do not pay because you were inconvenienced. They pay because you filed the right form at the right time, in writing, with a reference number attached.
Report it before you walk out of the airport
Find the baggage service desk in the arrivals hall, on the same side of customs as the belt. Ask for a Property Irregularity Report, usually called a PIR. It is the form airlines use to open a trace on a missing bag, and it generates a file reference number. That number is your claim. Everything you do afterwards is attached to it.
KLM, for example, tells passengers they receive a PIR with a file reference number that lets them follow the trace. Every major carrier runs the same system under a different name.
Do this before you clear customs and leave. Once you are outside, the desk is behind a security line you cannot cross, and you are relying on a web form or a call centre.
Check the form before you sign it. The flight number, the bag tag number, a description of the bag, and a delivery address all have to be right. If you are changing hotels in two days, say so and give a phone number that will actually work on a local SIM.
What a lost luggage claim is actually worth
Compensation on an international flight is capped by treaty. The Montreal Convention of 1999 covers journeys between countries that have signed it, and it sets a ceiling on what an airline must pay when checked baggage is lost, damaged, delayed or destroyed.
Those ceilings are reviewed every five years to keep pace with inflation. ICAO’s fourth review raised the baggage limit to 1,519 Special Drawing Rights, roughly US$2,000, effective 28 December 2024. A Special Drawing Right, or SDR, is a unit of account used by the IMF; the airline converts it into currency on the day it settles with you.
Read the word “limit” carefully. It is the most the airline can be made to pay, not a sum you are handed. You still have to show what was in the bag and what it was worth. A ceiling of two thousand dollars is worth nothing if your evidence is a photograph of an empty suitcase.
A purely domestic flight is a different matter. There the national rules and the airline’s own conditions of carriage apply, and the limits are usually lower.
The two deadlines that decide your lost luggage claim
Article 31 of the Montreal Convention puts hard time limits on complaints, and missing one bars you from taking the carrier to court at all, short of proving fraud.
For a damaged checked bag, you must complain as soon as you discover the damage and at the latest within seven days of receiving the bag. For a delayed bag, you have twenty-one days from the date the bag is placed at your disposal, meaning the day it is finally handed back to you.
In writing is the part people miss. A phone call to a call centre is not a complaint under the treaty. Email the airline’s baggage department, quote the PIR reference in the subject line, and keep the sent copy. One paragraph is enough.
Note that the seven-day clock for damage starts when you receive the bag, not when you unpack it. Open the suitcase at the airport if the sides look crushed.
Buying clothes and toiletries while you wait
If your bag is simply late rather than gone, you are allowed to buy what you need in the meantime and ask to be reimbursed. KLM describes this as reasonable, essential purchases such as basic toiletries and replacement clothing, and says it weighs the length of the trip, the climate at the destination, how long the bag was delayed and whether the purchase was genuinely necessary.
That last test is the one that catches people. Buy modestly and buy what the situation obviously demands. Cotton shirts and a toothbrush in Karachi in June read as essential. A new suitcase and a pair of branded shoes do not.
Keep every receipt and photograph it the same day, because thermal paper fades. KLM asks for reimbursement requests within twenty-one days of getting the bag back, which lines up with the treaty deadline. Your airline may word it differently, so look up its own baggage page rather than assuming.
When the bag never turns up
Airlines run a tracing period before they accept a bag is gone. KLM says it finds most bags within three days and waits twenty-one days before treating one as lost. Check the figure your own carrier publishes, because it varies.
Once the trace closes, the lost luggage claim changes shape. You are no longer asking where the bag is; you are claiming for its contents, and you will be asked for an itemised inventory. Write it line by line with an approximate purchase date and value for each item, and attach original receipts for anything expensive, like a laptop or a camera.
This is easier if you prepared. Before a long trip, photograph the open bag once it is packed and photograph the outside of the case. Keep the bag tag stub that gets stuck to your boarding pass, since the tag number is what the tracing system searches on.
Make the next lost luggage claim unnecessary
Medicine, chargers, documents, car keys and one change of clothes belong in the cabin, not in the hold. Cabin size limits differ sharply between carriers, so check our guide to hand baggage allowance before you buy a bag that only fits one airline.
If you are connecting through a Gulf hub on two separate tickets rather than one through-booking, ask at the first check-in desk who is carrying your bag on the second leg and whether it is tagged all the way to your final airport. Get the answer before you fly, not at the belt.
And put a paper card with your name, phone number and destination address inside the suitcase. Tags get torn off. The card is what tells a baggage handler in another country where the bag is supposed to be going.
Photo by Markus Winkler on Pexels
