bEatmstrJ posted:

I had a bag that got lost going from Ibiza to Paris on easyJet. I can assure you it was an unnecessarily painful experience. I did a ton of research expecting a lost bag outcome and did learn a few things in the process.
- From start to finish it was almost six months before I received a check.
- There is a set period of time that has to elapse before they will consider your bag officially lost and you can start the claim process. This is listed somewhere and I don't recall how long it was, but it seemed longer than it should have been.
- The compensation rates vary depending on whether its a domestic or international flight, so you'll want to know what your legal limit is based on your arrival/destination.
- The use a form of currency called "Special Drawing Rights" to calculate the amount you can get back. This can be converted to USD and is currently 1 SDR = $1.35 USD
- YMMV, but easyJet took literally two weeks to respond to every email I sent them. I think they were just hoping i'd give up.
- Your items will depreciated by the airline since they are "used". Take this into consideration when planning what was inside your bag. Figure about 30% depreciation.
- They will want receipts for most items you had, especially anything of significant value. Fortunately I keep a lot of receipts and was able to find most of the ones I needed.
- If they offered you some kind of daily allowance for needed personal items (usually ~$75/day for 3 days) this will be taken off of your final settlement if you used it.
- There is typically a rough estimate of what they will pay out based on weight. Dollars/lb of weight at time of check-in. Assuming they took the weight of your bag before misplacing it. This dollar amount should be documented somewhere, but is not hard set if you have receipts.

My recommendation is to get a rough idea of what your stuff was actually worth, find receipts for anything you can, find receipts for things that make up for the things you don't have receipts for, pad on an extra 30% worth of stuff, submit that as your claim and hopefully break even.

I wound up netting an extra $150-$200 over what my bag was worth by doing that.
Good luck!