British Airways still losing thousands of bags a week

Statistics compiled by the Association of European Airlines (AEA) and obtained by The Daily Telegraph also showed that BA's punctuality, particularly on long haul flights, has been poor.

It had been hoped that the opening of the airline's £4.3 billion Terminal 5 would improve the airline's performance.

This, however has not proved to be the case.

British Airways, despite using what has been described as a "state of the art" luggage system at the terminal, came near the bottom of the table of airlines. It was 25th out of 29 airlines, with 18.9 bags per thousand passengers going missing.

Another British carrier, bmi, was named as the European airline most likely to lose a passenger's bags.

According to the statistics, 25.4 bags per thousand bmi passengers became separated from the owner, which meant it took 29th and last place in the league table.

The one crumb of comfort for BA was that its performance between April and October represented a marked improvement on the first quarter of the year – before Terminal 5 was opened.

Then it came in 28th place and was losing 28.9 bags per thousand passengers.

Its latest result at least brings BA within five bags of the European industry average of 13.8 and comes during a summer when European airlines as a whole lost fewer bags.

In the previous summer airlines mislaid an average of 17 bags per thousand passengers.

The figures compiled by the AEA record incidents where passengers arrive at their destination, but their baggage does not.

Even though in most cases the bags are eventually reunited with their owners, passengers can find themselves having to buy supplies to tide them over until their luggage reappears.

BA's efforts to reunite passengers with their bags – for example carrying them by road to a sorting centre in Milan – did little to enhance the airline's image.

It also attracted bad publicity when it emerged that those bags which could not be returned to their owners were being auctioned off for charity.

The latest figures show that BA is performing worse than Air France and Lufthansa and is also mislaying more than twice as many bags as its main long-haul rival in Britain, Virgin Atlantic.

Meanwhile the latest punctuality figures show that more than one in four British Airways long haul flights either arrived or left at least 15 minutes late.

This put BA amongst Europe's poorest performers, being ranked 22nd out of 29 for punctual arrivals and 23rd for departures.

However, this in part reflects the difficulties BA has operating out of Heathrow which says it needs a third runway to cope with the traffic it handles.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk