The tens of thousands of bags flowing through Ukraine’s airports during Euro 2012 will be a source of stress for organizers, but a gold mine for unscrupulous handlers looking to take advantage of unsuspecting fans.
Kyiv’s Boryspil International Airport – which will handle the largest number of passengers – has a bad reputation for its luggage theft problems. When the Kyiv Post asked on Facebook for anyone who had suffered from theft from their luggage at Boryspil, dozens of responses flooded in.
Boryspil officials claim the theft rate at the airport is one of the lowest in the world and is decreasing, with only 75 reported in 2011.
But critics complain that the luggage-transport system at the airport offers too many opportunities for theft and say that many instances are simply not reported.
The entire staff of the police department at Boryspil, which is directly responsible for the investigations of thefts, was replaced twice in the past two years because of suspicions that they were covering the thefts, according to Andrew Guck, a Ukrainian lawyer consulting several international airline companies including British Airways, Austrian Airlines and Alitalia.
Viktor Maruschenko, a Kyiv photographer, was surprised to see the lock of his bag damaged when he arrived in Berlin from Boryspil earlier this month. Inside, all his belongings were a mess. He is sure that intruders who got into his bag were handlers at Boryspil.
“I didn’t have anything valuable in the bag. Just some clothing and toys for my son. But everything was upside down,” Maruschenko said. “A new notebook was unwrapped, maybe in search for the money. And there were things that were not mine – some ointment and men’s underwear.”
His case is typical of the dozens who got in touch with Kyiv Post – and like many others, it also went unreported. Maruschenko said he didn’t report that his bag had been broken into, because he thought it was too late.
Natalya Shevchuk, luggage officer at Windrose airline, said the company gets no more than 10 reports of thefts a year. Passengers only report the theft of valuable items.
“The claims are usually about jewelry or something similar. We don’t pay compensation for that, as it’s usually about the things we strongly recommend not to put into the luggage,” she says.
Guck said the whole system of moving the bag through the airport needs changing.
“Once we tried hard to persuade Boryspil’s management to change the scheme of luggage traffic inside the airport,” Guck, the lawyer, said. “We thought the scheme they had gave many chances for thefts. But they wouldn’t agree. So there is a certain intention to give those chances.”
According to Guck, airports tend to use their influence on airlines’ business to prevent conflicts about the thefts. So even if the company can prove the theft was committed by airport workers, the airlines often won’t demand any compensation because it is too important to maintain good relations with the airport, he added.
The last request that Guck made to Boryspil police led to them blaming the airline for not installing cameras onboard to watch the loading of bags. That, they insisted, was the reason that theft took place.
Oksana Ozhihova, a spokeswoman for Boryspil airport, said every theft report is investigated. She said airport security watches the luggage at all stages of its movement and loading onto planes.
If a bag is lost, passengers can demand compensation from the airline. This can be weight based, at $20-25 for each kilogram of the lost bag, or the passenger can support a larger claim with evidence. The maximum amount of compensation is set by the airline. At Windrose, it is $1,500.
“But often passengers overprice their bags and stuff on purpose, like claiming that a regular bag cost Hr 8,000 or so. That may cause a refusal,” Windrose’s Shevchuk said. “It is not widely known, but the labels that are put on bags at the airport can tell something about its type and even the fabric it’s made of. We use that information, too, to evaluate the bag.”
In 2011, Windrose received 553 claims of luggage missing, 18 of which were never found.
In cases when luggage is delivered with delay, the airline compensates for the purchase of emergency supplies.
Anna Lukanina from Kyiv didn’t know that when her bag was lost last year. She flew from Boryspil to Greece, and her bag, as she found out later, was sent to China. The bag came back a week later. The only pocket not protected with cellophane wrapping was stolen from. “Someone just wanted that travel iron I had there,” she said.
According to Shevchuk, Boryspil usually has problems with mishandling bags in summer when the flow of passengers increases.
WizzAir, a low-cost airline based in Hungary, left Boryspil for Zhulany Airport in Kyiv a year ago.
According to Hrystyna Kosonotska, the company’s spokeswoman in Ukraine, there have been no thefts reported and the number of lost bags has halved.
Kyiv Post staff writer Olga Rudenko can be reached at [email protected].
