British Airways worst for losing luggage

British Airways has been named and shamed as the worst airline in Europe for losing passengers' luggage.

The company mishandled 23 bags per 1,000 passengers in 2006 - the poorest performance of the 24 members of the Association of European Airlines (AEA).

The UK's Air Transport Users Council (AUC) said BA had admitted its performance on bags last year was not acceptable and that it apologised to its customers.

The AUC said AEA baggage figures for 2006 showed that more than 5.6 bags went missing among the 24 airlines - an average of 15.7 bags per 1,000 passengers.

Among those airlines which had worse-than-average figures were Lufthansa of Germany Air France, Italy's Alitalia and KLM of the Netherlands.

The AUC added that the AEA had said that 85 per cent of mishandled bags were returned to passengers within 48 hours, but this meant that about one million bags were taking longer than two days to reach their owners and some "never get returned at all".

BA operations director Geoff Want said: "The number of bags per month we are handling at our Heathrow home has gone up by 25 per cent since the change in UK security regimes last August and this is reflected in higher numbers of delayed bags in the second half of the year when compared with the first half of 2006.

"The volumes of hold baggage going through Heathrow, the change in security procedures and some baggage system failures within Terminal 4 has not helped our performance, but we accept that overall the levels of service we offered to our customers has not been up to an acceptable standard.

"We fully apologise to customers who have been affected by delayed baggage in the past year.

"We have undertaken a significant amount of work to improve our performance in the current working environment and we therefore look forward to an improved operational performance this summer, and in the future when Terminal 5 opens in March 2008."

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