Lost luggage Sydney int chaos

[Economy_Gold]

Earlier this year, I had a frustrating, but also irritating experience with a lost luggage suitcase with Qantas baggage services in Sydney (international).
The background is that a suitcase did not arrive with me in Melbourne after my Qantas flight from Singapore. As the final destination of the ticket was Sydney (and I live there), the lost luggage person in Melbourne filed the issue as a Sydney lost luggage case.
The coming days were very frustating: Over five days, there was no information available! The luggage was not tracked in the online lost luggage system and, calling the Qantas lost luggage phone number, resulted in a minimum 45 minutes wait every day (despite being Platinum and despite the system asking for your Frequent Flyer number at the beginning). The staff I dealt with were always friendly and seemed professional.
However, the real shock came when I was finally told on the phone that the suitcase was "probably" in Sydney after it been located in Singapore and sent down (of course, this was not listed in the online system at all) and that I could come to Qantas baggage services in Sydney to pick it up myself to speed up the process.
So that night I went to Qantas baggage services at Syndey International to find a) the office closed at 6:15pm despite a sign saying that it is open 6am-9pm every day, b) after finally locating the staff, they took me into a room filled with suitcases to see if I could find my one in it in all this mountains of suitcases. Again, I want to emphasise that the staff I dealt with were friendly and I think they did the best they could with a very unsuitable system.

I found my suitcase there and got home, but could not believe that in the suitcase room there was no system of allocating the luggage pieces to sections of the room and that the online system was a complete failure in my case even though my suitcase had its original luggage label throughout the time.

So my question is: Was that a particularly unlucky experience or is the Qantas baggage services operational system broken and others have similar experiences?
If others have similar experiences, I think Qantas should urgently update its operational system in this part of the business as I think this primitive operations system is simply unacceptable in 2018. One particular frustrating point of my experience was that the failure of the online system to contain any useful information resulted in a waste of my time on the phone every day and lost time for the staff that had to deal with my case.

 

[ermen]

Wow 5 days is ridiculous to retrieve delayed baggage. One normally expects one business day.

Why didnt QF arrange for your bag to be couriered to your home or office?

 

[Pushka]

Wow 5 days is ridiculous to retrieve delayed baggage. One normally expects one business day.

Why didnt QF arrange for your bag to be couriered to your home or office?

I think they had the choice ‘to speed things up’ by collecting it.

 

[ermen]

I think they had the choice ‘to speed things up’ by collecting it.

I would have thought that once the bags arrived into SYD, it wouldnt be stuck into a baggae warehouse (or if so, into a temporary holding area), but straight onto the courier truck.

From the description above, seems like the bags seem to sit in a warehouse for some amnt of time?

 

[Economy_Gold]

I would have thought that once the bags arrived into SYD, it wouldnt be stuck into a baggae warehouse (or if so, into a temporary holding area), but straight onto the courier truck.

From the description above, seems like the bags seem to sit in a warehouse for some amnt of time?

Yes, the phone agent gave me the option of picking it up myself or getting it delivered "next week". And all of that with the remark "it should be in Sydney, but this is not sure".

My impression is that the bags are not immediately delivered, at least in busy times such as January.
As I said, I think this is simply not good enough from a customer perspective.

 

[RooFlyer]

A few years ago (maybe 5 now) I had a piece of checked luggage not arrive with me in SYD after a flight from LAX. Like the OP, a 'comedy of errors' ensued with no information and mis-information and I think I got the bag 3 or 4 days later (I live in Tasmania).

As I had a contact with the Qantas Tas state manager at the time, I took it up with him, taking advantage of an invitation to 'tell him of any major hassles experienced'. He looked into what happened in detail, and reported back to me.

The major take-out was, once you are parted with your luggage in an overseas destination, in reality the first thing the Australian baggage system knows about it for sure is when it emerges from Customs at the Australian arrival port. It can be planned and logged to be loaded, say, on the next flight from the original port, but there is no certainty in this. It might be skipped in favour of other baggage/freight. Homeward-bound delayed bags appear to have a low priority, as its figured that you are 'home' and the bag isn't urgently needed.

At the time, I got reports from the on-line tracking that it was on such-and-such a flight, but it wasn't. I was completely in the dark until I got a call from some-one to say they had it there, in Sydney, land side.

One would hope the system is improved now, but I wouldn't count on it.

 

[ermen]

My experiences are not with QF. But my baggage has been delayed twice.

First time: SQ SIN-PER. On arrival, got a message to see the DNATA counter and found out they did not manage to load my stroller. This was delivered next day to my address.

Second time: CX HKG-CMB, then QR CMB-xDOH-LHR on two separate tickets. Baggage did not make the transfer in CMB as the CX lady did not interline it properly it seems. Got a message on arrival in LHR to see the DNATA counter again and said my bags will be delivered the next morning on the QR inbound. Had an option to collect the bags at LHR or get it delivered.

So, I do not see why QF will take 5 days to deliver a bag, esp when they run multiple services between MEL/SYD-SIN

 

[drron]

When BA didn't load our bags PHL-ORY they left us in the dark.But we found out from Schipol lost luggage that our bags had travelled the next day-PHL-ORY-LHR-AMS but that they had not notified BA or anyone else at AMS so our bags were recovered by the lost property office and were about to be sent home.Fortunately a concierge at Marriott Amsterdam tracked them down for us.
So perhaps QF have decided to copy BA.

 

[Anna]

My unfortunately extensive experience with misconnected QF bags has taught me that the so-called online system is almost useless. The way that staff can tell for sure where your bag is, is by searching for your bag code on individual flight numbers. Obvs they do not have time to do this for everyone. If you strike a good agent on the phone, and you give them the specific flight number that you think your bag might be on, they will often search the records of that flight for you. If you're able to find out what flight it is on, the best thing to do (if you can) is to go to the airport personally to collect it. Otherwise you're at their mercy of when it may (or may not) be delivered to you.

Totally agree that the system is absolutely ridiculous and seems designed not to give pax any useful info about misconnected bags. And do not get me started on the unavailability of the baggage staff to answer the phone or even be at the office when they should be

 

[bam71]

This is why we have a trakdot. At least it tells us which airport our bags are in. Only one occasion we didn't use it and guess of course it was the only time to date that we needed it!

 

[jb747]

So, I do not see why QF will take 5 days to deliver a bag, esp when they run multiple services between MEL/SYD-SIN

The issue is that you are not actually dealing with the QF (or any other particular airline) system for 99% of the time. Baggage systems belong to airports (and occasionally airlines), so it's effectively being transhipped, even if just going from the front of the terminal to the aircraft.

As for the 5 days...it may have been on a round the world tour, instead sitting within an airport somewhere. If it was mis-shipped at the start, it would most likely have been sent back to the start point, before heading to join you. Perhaps you should try to get some points for that travel!

I haven't checked a bag for a couple of decades. The 'system' got me twice in a row...and I was operating crew.

 

[Economy_Gold]

My unfortunately extensive experience with misconnected QF bags has taught me that the so-called online system is almost useless. The way that staff can tell for sure where your bag is, is by searching for your bag code on individual flight numbers. Obvs they do not have time to do this for everyone. If you strike a good agent on the phone, and you give them the specific flight number that you think your bag might be on, they will often search the records of that flight for you. If you're able to find out what flight it is on, the best thing to do (if you can) is to go to the airport personally to collect it. Otherwise you're at their mercy of when it may (or may not) be delivered to you.

Totally agree that the system is absolutely ridiculous and seems designed not to give pax any useful info about misconnected bags. And do not get me started on the unavailability of the baggage staff to answer the phone or even be at the office when they should be

At least I am not the only "victim" of this system

But honestly if this is a regular occurance, I wonder why this "premium airline" Qantas does not look into it and improves the system?
As some have said, the best is not to check in luggage at all, but that is not really possible for a winter family holiday in Europe...

 

[ozmille]

we arrived in SYD on the 12th of Jan with 2 out of 5 bags missing, one bag was located in HKG and arrived on the 13rd. The other bag we had no update for the next 6 days of calls every day. Finally I was told that the bag had actually arrived in SYD on the 14th but nobody had processed it to send it to us, the phone agent said that they had a backlog of about 400 bags at SYD International which they were working through.
What I don't understand is why the one bag was sent to us the day after we arrived and the other one was at the airport for 6 days