My Lost Bag That Traveled the World for 5 Weeks – What Emirates Did Right

Earlier this year, I wrote a couple of posts about the ridiculous situation with my lost bag on Emirates (ridiculous given the route, not that it would get lost at all). Now, since it has been completely resolved, I thought I would do a summary for those that followed along and also mention what I thought that Emirates did right.

My Lost Bag That Traveled the World for 5 Weeks

What Happened?

I was flying the most simple of flights – flying Emirates from Newark to Athens. What makes this so simple is that this flight is the only flight by Emirates out of Newark and there only flight to Athens (except for the continuation that comes from Dubai). When I arrived in Athens, I found one of my bags but not the second bag. I filed a report with their contract company for ground services and fully expected to have it delivered within the next few days (as has always happened with lost bags on my trips).

However, 5 weeks went by before my bag was finally delivered, and it was actually delivered back to the US since that was where I was at the time. In fact, it had never even made it to Athens at all! Here was the route that my lost bag went on over the course of the 5 weeks:

Courtesy of GCMap.com

That’s right, it made its way from Newark to Frankfurt on Lufthansa and then to Cairo with Egyptair (where it apparently stayed for about a week) before heading back to Munich and then finally to JFK and Rochester using Star Alliance airlines. It was a little odd since Emirates has no relationship at all with those Star Alliance airlines.

What Emirates Did Right With My Lost Bag

I did have some unhappy things to say about Emirates losing my bag on such a simple route. But, the way they handled many things after the fact made me quite impressed with them.

Twitter Team

Their Twitter team contacted me a total of 14 times over the 5 weeks. They were always prompt in their responses to me and pointing me in the right direction for various aspects of my claim. They also checked the response system to make sure my e-mails with the required information got to the right people. I have to say that the Emirates Twitter team was a pleasure to work with and I was very pleased with their help and assistance.

Goldair Handling

Goldair Handling is the contract company that handles Emirates’ ground services in Athens. As a result, they are the ones I filed the complaint with initially. They did a great job of calling me 5 times, unprompted, over the first two weeks to let me know that there was no news about it yet but they were still looking for it. While getting a phone call that says “there is nothing to report” is not exactly great news, I really appreciated the way that they handled it – especially in the end when it turned out that Goldair never even had possession of the bag at any point.

Emirates Customer Service

I really appreciated that Emirates kept with it to find the bag. They did this even after they knew they were going to have to reimburse me for many things in the bag after the 21 day period of the bag being lost. In the end, the bag had spent most of those 5 weeks with airlines that had nothing to do with Emirates. Not only that, but the bag was on a totally different continent from where I departed from, landed in, and from where Emirates has their base.

To be able to find it with those conditions is pretty great! The bag tags/ID tags had been missing on the bags so I can only assume that the bag was eventually found from a main system where the contents were matched with a lost and found report.

How It Ended

In the end, I received my bag back with all of its contents intact (after 5 weeks). Not only that, but I shortly after that received an amount of just under $800 deposited in my bank account for the things that I filed a claim for with receipts showing that I had had to replace those items. I often wondered if I would ever see any money but was very happy that Emirates paid it back to me. It was also incredible to me that the amount they paid me was about the same amount that I had paid them for my two roundtrip flights. 🙂

No one wants to lose a bag. While I am still somewhat amazed that Emirates managed to lose the bag in the first place, I am impressed with how they handled things along the way and in the end. Thank you, Emirates!