whisper2

We flew back from Bermuda on Sunday and one of our bikes was damaged (thankfully not damaged on the way out!). I am trying to file a damaged baggage report (it says I must claim within 7 days of receiving the bag).
I start at the URL : https://www.britishairways.com/conte...baggage-claims

1. Have you reported your baggage problem?

I click on the "Report your problem" link and on the next page I go to "Report Damage to a Bag or contents" and click on "Report and claim". I fill in the booking reference, and select the return flight. It then goes to a page :


As I do not have a Damaged Baggage report reference to make a claim - I must report it first, so I click "Make a Report" which takes me back to the page that I started at :
https://www.britishairways.com/conte...baggage-claims

So I am stuck forever in a loop - unable to report and unable to claim. I have tried different browsers, with no change.
Am I missing something obvious, or is there somewhere else to generate a damaged baggage report?

corporate-wage-slave

Did you manage to report the damage at the airport? If not I think you will need to call BA first to get the relevant reference number.

whisper2

Thanks for the reply. No, I did not report it at the airport because I only discovered the damage when I unpacked the bike from the bag the next day at home.
I will call BA in the morning. Is there a Baggage department or some group I should ask to speak to?

1Aturnleft

Correct if you dont have a claim reference issued from the baggage team at the arrival airport then you'll need to call and have the call centre create one for you. You may get some initial pushback in them not bring able to complete this but it is definitely possible. I also had to have one created a few months ago. Once created the subsequent process of making a claim is relatively easy to process.

corporate-wage-slave

Which of course is the sort of thing that will happen. There is a baggage team but very difficult to get hold of, but the contact centre can raise the relevant entry. If you live very near T5, there is now a BA baggage desk landside, Arrivals South end. There was always a somewhat forbidding door there, but recently they have put in a proper customer service desks with customer trained staff.

For the benefit of other cases, there are some self serve PCs by carousel 8 in non-domestic baggage claim T5. Less obvious is that they have a camera-on-a-rope attached to them, so you can report damage there, take photos of the damage and get the Irregularity number in one self-serve operation.

whisper2

I called BA today. The adviser said there was no baggage team and there was no way she could raise a baggage report. She told me she would explain how to do it on the website.

She directed me to the page I had been at (in 1st post) and we went through to the point (screen shot above) where it says you need a "Damaged Baggage Report Reference" to proceed, at which point she said to carry on with the claim and ignore the requirement! Sure enough there was no requirement for the Damaged Baggage Report Reference - and the claim has been lodged.

It isn't a big claim - they smashed the £90 rear derailleur, and that is all I am claiming. My travel insurance is no use as they have a £100 excess.