Delivery of Lost Bags Banned

[Josh Wilson]

SEELANGERs - 

 

If any of you have students traveling to locations in Russia outside of
Moscow or St. Pete, the article below should be of interest to you. 

 

We actually have a student in Irkutsk to whom this has happened - where the
luggage was not delivered in time for the connecting flight - making it
impossible for the owner to claim the luggage and forward it on. Said bag is
languishing in bureaucratic limbo in Moscow now.  

 

We are currently working on processing and shipping a power of attorney in
order to have one of our Moscow representatives take care of this - but it
is a bit of a nightmare (and highly silly) regulation they have now. 

 

Josh Wilson
Assistant Director
The School of Russian and Asian Studies
Editor in Chief
Vestnik, The Journal of Russian and Asian Studies
SRAS.org 
jwilson at sras.org

 

 


Delivery of Lost Bags Banned


By Natalya Krainova

Staff Writer

http://www.sptimesrussia.com/index.php?action_id=2
<http://www.sptimesrussia.com/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=28047>
&story_id=28047 

MOSCOW - Did your bag go missing en route to Russia? Don't expect the
airline to deliver it to your doorstep.

Passengers are being told that they have to make the trip back to the
airport to claim their baggage after authorities abruptly decided to start
enforcing a five-year-old regulation that requires passengers to escort
their own bags through customs.

The change is already creating headaches for people traveling to Russia, and
an air industry expert could not recall another European country that
requires passengers to pick up their own bags.

Travelers with missing luggage have typically signed waivers allowing
airlines to take the bags through Russian customs once they are found and
then deliver them to the owners.

These waivers, however, do not give the airlines the legal right to carry
the luggage through customs, said Alexei Fomin, a customs officer at
Domodedovo Airport in Moscow.

"Before, it was just all being done illegally," Fomin told The St.
Petersburg Times in an interview.

The authorities are now enforcing a 2003 government regulation that says
passengers must clear lost luggage through customs themselves unless they
give power of attorney to another person or legal entity, Federal Customs
Service spokeswoman Natalya Semikina said.

Airlines that have been delivering lost baggage without power of attorney
have been violating the law, Semikina said.

Neither customs officials nor the airlines interviewed for this report could
say exactly when the recent enforcement of the law began, offering estimates
ranging from late November to last Wednesday.

The airlines, however, insisted they were not informed of the original 2003
law and placed the blame squarely on the authorities for lack of
enforcement.

Delta Air Lines had previously asked passengers to compose a handwritten
note giving permission to the airline to clear the lost bags, which were
then delivered at its expense, said Leonid Tarasov, head of Delta's
operations in Russian and the CIS.

With the rules now being enforced, however, airlines will be unable to offer
such a service because there are no notaries present in the customs control
area who could sign off on power of attorney rights, Tarasov said.

"They understand that there is no notary there," Tarasov said. "That's how
Russian laws work: It's easier to ban something than to solve a problem."

If customs officials have not been enforcing the law for several years,
"it's not the fault of the airlines," said Aage Duenhaupt, Lufthansa's head
of corporate communications in Europe. "We always abide by the law."

Lufthansa will compensate passengers for taxi expenses to travel to the
airport from the Moscow area to collect lost luggage, Duenhaupt said by
telephone from London.

Swiss International Air Lines will do the same for its passengers, said
spokeswoman Yulia Fyodorova.

British Airways will "apologize to our customers and pay compensation for
their unplanned travel" to the airport, said spokeswoman Victoria Mezhenina.

Delta, however, will not be able to compensate passengers for trips due to
the cumbersome tax paperwork that would be involved, Tarasov said.

Not all airlines were aware of the ban on delivering lost baggage. Aeroflot
spokeswoman Irina Dannenberg said the airline had been delivering lost
luggage up until the New Year and that she was unaware of any changes. She
said she could not say whether Aeroflot might compensate passengers who have
to retrieve their lost bags.

The changes are catching passengers by surprise. Simone, a German citizen
who asked that only her first name be used, said she learned about the new
rule from a customs official after standing in a long line at the lost
luggage desk at Domodedovo Airport on Jan. 12.

Simone said she spent three hours on the telephone with Lufthansa the next
day trying to establish her suitcase's whereabouts and another four hours
the following day driving to Domodedovo and back.

"With six years expat experience in Russia . I am able to deal with such
situations, but there were many foreigners losing their nerves," she said by
e-mail Friday.

There appear to be ways to skirt the new rule, though not necessarily
legally.

A Moscow-based businessman said in an interview Friday that one of his
employees flew to Moscow from abroad in mid-December and caught a connecting
flight to Siberia. The airline lost the employee's luggage, and despite the
fact that he was already in Siberia, customs officials demanded that he
return to Moscow to claim the baggage, said the businessman, who spoke on
condition of anonymity.

"Needless to say, the problem was only solved by the exchange of money," he
said.

Ezekiel Pfeifer and Carl Schreck contributed to this report.

 


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