After 11 days: Customer finds lost suitcase at Zurich Airport
Flight luggage lost after arrival in Switzerland
Oliver Wägli (42) is looking for a suitcase for two weeks
When his mother-in-law’s suitcase goes missing at the end of June, Oliver Wägli from Rudolfstetten AG thinks nothing bad. He was wrong: in the end it took eleven days and countless phone calls before the family finally got the suitcase back.
Published: 07/12/2022 at 01:23
It begins on June 30th: Oliver Wägli (42) from Rudolfstetten AG Herzt at Zurich Airport mother-in-law Celyne (66), who has just flown in from Montreal, Canada, for a one-month vacation.
The problem: Your checked-in suitcase is left behind at Geneva Airport on this warm summer’s day. There, an unplanned stopover by their Air Canada aircraft was too much for the overwhelmed ground handlers. Celyne writes her son-in-law’s phone number and home address on a form and submits the loss report to Swissport, the company responsible. She thinks nothing bad. Wrongly so, as it soon turned out.
Call center in Romania
Three days later, Wägli gets the message that Swissport has commissioned a courier service to deliver the suitcase that has meanwhile arrived. Then it stays quiet – for several days. Wägli: “My mother-in-law wore my wife’s clothes and was getting more and more nervous.”
He takes care of it. Wägli waited 45 minutes in the telephone queue until he was put through to a Romanian call center. “The advisor wanted to get rid of me as quickly as possible and referred me to the courier service.”
Swissport takes the long waiting times, but says: “Our contact center is currently being overwhelmed with inquiries and is therefore under a lot of pressure.” Additional employees handle the five times higher volume of forwarded baggage. There are currently 93 trolleys with forwarded luggage at Zurich Airport. Night shifts are not uncommon.
Wrong address given
When Wägli finally gets the courier service after countless advantages, the suitcase is already back at the airport. Swissport incorrectly provided the courier with Celyne’s Canadian address and phone number.
Ask the courier service, AKS Autokurier-Service GmbH. Co-Managing Director Jürg Elmer (63) takes Swissport under his protection. The information you receive is “at least 95 percent correct”. If an address is obviously wrong, call the recipient on the phone. “Only in extremely rare cases do we not reach the target person.”
But that is exactly the case with Wäglis. Spent several days through the Romanian call center jungle – without success.
Odyssey ends at the airport
On the eleventh day, the Wägli family drove to the airport to look for their suitcases. Even the lost-and-found office knows nothing: “The reference number could not be found in the system,” says Wägli. After repeated enquiries, his mother-in-law is allowed into the lost-and-found office. She finds the suitcase hidden on a wagon.
Swissport justifies itself that it sometimes happens that the label is no longer on the suitcase and the piece of luggage cannot be scanned. And: “We recommend passengers who live in the vicinity of the airport to pick up their luggage directly at the airport, as they often get their luggage back faster than by courier service.”
Little consolation for Oliver Wägli and his family after eleven days of stress: “Had we known earlier, we would have gone by a week earlier.”