There is a specific, lonely moment that every frequent flyer eventually experiences. The carousel has been going round for twenty minutes. The crowd has thinned to three or four people wearing the same expression you are. Then the belt stops, the hall empties, and it becomes undeniable that your bag is not coming. We see the aftermath of this often enough at our Surat desk that we can say something reassuring: in the overwhelming majority of cases the bag is not lost, it is late, and it will reach you within a day or two. But what you do in the next thirty minutes — before you leave that airport — decides whether the airline reimburses what this costs you, or whether you pay for it yourself.
This guide walks through the sequence properly: the form you must file, the treaty that sets the ceiling on what you can claim, what counts as a reimbursable expense while you wait, when a delayed bag legally becomes a lost bag, and where travel insurance covers the gap the airline leaves. We have deliberately avoided quoting rupee figures for compensation, because they are set in a foreign unit that moves with the exchange rate and is formally revised every few years. What we give you instead is the shape of the entitlement and the exact language to use.
Do not leave the airport without filing a PIR
This is the single most important sentence in this article. Before you pass through the exit of the arrivals hall, find the airline's baggage services desk — usually tucked beside the carousels — and file a Property Irregularity Report, universally known as a PIR. It is a short form recording your flight, your bag's description and tag number, and the address where the bag should be delivered. You will be given a reference number, often a five-letter airport code followed by digits. That reference is the thread that every later conversation, delivery and claim hangs from. Photograph it before you walk away, and photograph the form itself.
Travellers forfeit valid claims by skipping this step more often than by any other mistake. If you leave the airport and telephone the airline the next morning, you have handed them a clean argument that the bag was delivered and something happened afterwards. File the PIR while you are standing in the terminal, even if staff tell you the bag is already located and will follow you — especially then, because that is exactly the situation where delivery slips by a day and expenses start accumulating with no paper trail behind them.
The treaty that sets the ceiling: what the Montreal Convention gives you
Almost every international flight an Indian traveller takes falls under the Montreal Convention, a treaty India has ratified and that binds airlines flying between member states. It matters because it replaces the airline's goodwill with a legal liability. Under it, the carrier is liable for destroyed, lost, damaged or delayed baggage up to a fixed ceiling expressed in Special Drawing Rights, an International Monetary Fund accounting unit rather than any national currency. The cap has stood in the region of 1,288 SDR per passenger, which converts to roughly one and a half lakh rupees at recent rates — but the figure is formally reviewed every five years and the conversion moves daily, so verify the current ceiling rather than relying on a number from a blog, including this one.
Two features of the Convention surprise people. First, the liability is per passenger, not per bag, so a family of four travelling on one booking has four ceilings rather than one. Second, the airline is liable even where it was not negligent — you do not have to prove the airline did anything wrong, only that the bag was in its care and did not arrive properly. The airline can escape liability only in narrow circumstances, such as an inherent defect in the baggage itself. This is a genuinely strong protection, and it is routinely under-used because travellers assume compensation is discretionary.
The deadlines are short and they are strict
The Convention sets hard time limits, and missing them is the second most common way a claim dies. For damaged baggage you must complain in writing within seven days of receiving the bag. For delayed baggage you must complain in writing within twenty-one days from the date the bag is finally placed at your disposal. For a bag that is never found, the clock generally runs from when the airline admits the loss or from when it should have arrived. Separately, any court action has a two-year outer limit. The phrase to hold on to is in writing — a phone call to a call centre is not a complaint, however sympathetic the agent sounds. Send an email, keep the sent copy, and reference your PIR number in the subject line.
In practice, most delayed bags surface within forty-eight hours, and travellers relax and never send the written complaint because the bag came back. That is fine if the delay cost you nothing. If it cost you a change of clothes, a phone charger and a day of your holiday, the written complaint within twenty-one days is what converts that into money.
What you can spend while you wait, and how to document it
The Convention entitles you to compensation for the damage caused by the delay, which in everyday terms means the reasonable and necessary things you had to buy because your belongings were elsewhere. Toiletries, underwear and a change of clothing are uncontroversial. A business traveller buying a shirt for a meeting the next morning is on solid ground. A week of designer shopping is not, and will be refused. The test airlines apply is reasonableness relative to the length of the delay and the purpose of your trip, and a good rule of thumb is to buy what you would have grudgingly bought with your own money if nobody were reimbursing you.
Keep every receipt, and keep them as photographs as well as paper, because thermal till receipts fade to blank within weeks and claims often take longer than that to settle. Some airlines offer an immediate fixed allowance at the baggage desk — a small cash sum or a voucher — to cover the first night. Take it, but ask explicitly whether accepting it settles your claim or merely advances against it. The answer is almost always the latter, but get it in writing on the PIR if you can, because a signature on a full-and-final settlement for a token amount is difficult to undo later.
When a delayed bag becomes a lost bag
Airlines do not usually declare a bag lost on a fixed day, but the industry convention most carriers follow is that baggage untraced after twenty-one days is treated as lost, and the claim shifts from delay expenses to the value of the bag and its contents. At that point you will be asked for an inventory. Producing one from memory, weeks later, under the pressure of a form, is how people end up under-claiming badly. This is the argument for a habit that costs two minutes: before you close your suitcase, lay the contents out on the bed and take one photograph. It is not evidence of value, but it is a reliable memory aid and it reads as credible to an assessor.
Expect depreciation. Airlines settle on the depreciated value of used clothing and belongings, not the replacement cost, and receipts for expensive items help enormously. This is also where the standard advice earns its keep — medication, documents, jewellery, electronics, spectacles and anything you genuinely cannot replace abroad belong in your cabin bag and nowhere else. Our guide to prescription medicines and travelling with medication abroad explains why a week's supply in hand luggage is non-negotiable, and our international cabin and check-in baggage allowance rules covers what the airlines will actually let you carry in the cabin to make that possible.
Where travel insurance fills the gap the airline leaves
The airline's liability and your insurance policy are two separate systems, and the smart play is to understand what each one does rather than treating them as alternatives. Insurance typically pays a fixed benefit after a defined waiting period — commonly somewhere between six and twelve hours of delay — and pays it quickly, which is exactly what you want on day one when you are standing in a foreign city with nothing. The airline's Convention liability is larger but slower, and is what you fall back on for a genuinely lost bag. Many policies also specifically require the PIR, which is yet another reason to file it.
Read your policy for the waiting period and the per-item sub-limits, which are where most disappointments live: a policy with a healthy overall baggage figure may still cap any single item at a fraction of it. Our travel insurance guide for Indian travellers sets out what the different covers actually do, and if you do need to use it, our walkthrough of how a travel insurance claim actually moves from filing to payout will save you a fortnight of guessing. One practical caution: do not claim the same expense from both the airline and the insurer. You are entitled to be made whole, not to profit, and insurers routinely ask what the airline paid.
Connecting flights, self-transfers and the rule that catches people out
Baggage goes missing most often at connections, and not all connections are equal in the eyes of the law. If your journey is on a single ticket, the whole itinerary is one contract of carriage, your bag is checked through, and the carrier is responsible end to end even where two different airlines are involved. If you have booked two separate tickets to save money — a self-transfer — you have created two contracts, you will usually have to collect and re-check your bag in between, and a delay on the first leg that causes you to miss the second is, legally, your problem and not the airline's.
That distinction matters for baggage and it matters even more for the flight itself. Before you book a tight self-transfer, read our explanation of what you are owed when a connection is missed or boarding is denied, and for the domestic leg of an onward Indian journey, the current DGCA rules on cancellations and refunds set out what carriers within India must provide. The cheaper itinerary is often genuinely cheaper. It is simply not the same product, and it is worth knowing that before the bag is missing rather than after.
Small habits that make the whole problem smaller
A handful of unglamorous precautions do most of the work. Photograph your packed suitcase and its exterior before you leave home, so you can describe it accurately. Put a tag with your phone number and email on the outside and a duplicate card with the same details inside the bag, since exterior tags are what tear off first. Remove old routing stickers from previous trips, because scanners read them and misroute bags. Never pack your return documents, medication or house keys in checked baggage. Split essentials across bags if two of you are travelling together, so a single missing suitcase does not strip one person of everything. And build a genuine buffer into connections rather than the airline's stated minimum, which is calculated for a day when nothing goes wrong.
If you would like a tidier version of all this to work from, our complete international travel packing checklist folds these habits into the list you pack from, so they happen without you having to remember them at eleven at night the day before you fly.
Frequently asked questions
Can I claim if I did not buy travel insurance? Yes. The airline's liability under the Montreal Convention is independent of insurance entirely — it exists because of the treaty and your contract of carriage, not because you bought a policy. Insurance adds speed and fills gaps, but its absence does not remove your right to claim from the airline.
The airline says the bag was delayed, not lost, so it will not pay. Is that right? Delay is expressly covered by the Convention, and compensation for delay is a recognised category, not a favour. Put your claim in writing within twenty-one days of receiving the bag, attach receipts for what the delay forced you to buy, and quote your PIR reference.
Who is responsible when two airlines are involved? On a single through-ticket, you may generally claim against the carrier that flew the leg where the loss occurred, or against the first or last carrier on the itinerary — you do not have to work out which airline mislaid it. On separate tickets, each airline is responsible only for its own leg, which is the central risk of a self-transfer.
What if my bag arrives damaged rather than late? The seven-day written-complaint deadline applies, and it runs from the day you receive the bag. Photograph the damage at the airport if you can, and file the report before leaving, exactly as you would for a missing bag. Normal wear and tear — scuffs, minor scratches, a worn handle — is generally excluded.
A missing bag is a bad evening, not a ruined holiday, provided somebody handles the paperwork properly while you get on with the trip. When Explera Vacations has booked your flights, that is our job rather than yours: we hold the ticket details, the tag numbers and the airline relationships, and we chase the tracing desk while you are at dinner. If you would like your next international trip looked after end to end, browse our holiday packages from Surat or send your dates to our travel desk through the contact page and we will come back with a plan, honest pricing and the small print already read.
