Your bag didn't arrive: who pays, and in what order

Three payers, and an order

A missing bag usually has three possible sources of money, and they are not alternatives you pick between — they sit in a sequence, and most of them require the one before it to have happened first.

• The airline. Legally first in line. International carriage is governed by the Montreal Convention, which caps liability at roughly 1,300 SDR per passenger — a currency basket, somewhere near US$1,700 depending on the rate. That single cap covers delay, damage and loss together.
• Your credit card. If the fare was paid with it, many cards add baggage delay cover (a daily allowance for essentials after a threshold, commonly 4–12 hours) and lost-baggage cover.
• Your travel insurance policy. Usually the broadest, and usually the one that pays last — most policies are explicitly secondary and will ask what the airline and the card paid before settling the remainder.

Claiming out of order is the common mistake. A card or policy claim submitted without the airline’s file reference is normally rejected outright, and re-opening it later is much harder than doing it in sequence.

The deadline that catches everyone

Report it before you leave the airport. Get a Property Irregularity Report and its file reference — that document is the key to every other claim.

The formal written windows are short and strict under the Montreal Convention: 7 days from receipt to complain about damage, and 21 days from the date it should have been delivered for delay. Miss those and the airline can decline on that basis alone, regardless of the merits. Card and policy deadlines run separately, often 20 to 60 days, and they start from the incident rather than from when you got home and unpacked.

Delayed, damaged and lost pay differently

• Delayed. Buy the essentials you actually need and keep every receipt. Reimbursement is for reasonable replacements — toiletries, underwear, a change of clothes, a charger. Sensible is the standard; a designer replacement will be argued about.
• Damaged. Show the bag before leaving the airport if you possibly can. Wheels, handles and minor scuffs are excluded by most airlines as ordinary wear.
• Lost. Most airlines treat a bag as lost after 21 days, and only then does the full claim open. The delay claim converts rather than adding to it.

What is excluded almost everywhere

Assume none of these three payers covers: cash, jewellery, documents and passports, and — the one that matters most — electronics. Laptops and cameras are excluded outright by several major policies and sharply sublimited by the rest. There is no version of this where checking a laptop is a good idea.

Also commonly excluded: fragile and perishable items, anything left unattended, and business samples. Medication should be in your cabin bag for the same reason — a delay of two days is an inconvenience unless it separates someone from a prescription.

One thing that quietly voids card cover

Card baggage benefits attach through the fare, and on some cards paying with an airline’s own frequent-flyer miles voids the baggage benefit specifically — while leaving that same ticket’s cancellation and delay cover intact, because those use a broader test. An award ticket can therefore have real trip-delay cover and no baggage cover at all. Some baggage benefits also require a round trip.

Before you fly

1. Photograph the packed contents and the bag itself. Proving what was inside is the hardest part of any claim.
2. Put a tracker in the bag. It will not make anyone pay faster, but knowing where it is changes the conversation.
3. Carry medication, documents, valuables and one change of clothes in the cabin.
4. Keep the bag tag stub. It is the second thing every claim asks for.

Where TripTov fits

TripTov knows how each fare was paid, so it knows whether your card’s baggage benefit was ever activated — including the award-ticket case above, where the answer differs per benefit on the same ticket. It holds the policy limits alongside the booking, so “what am I covered for, and by whom” is answerable at the carousel rather than a week later. Try it, or read when a delayed flight owes you money.