A Passenger Bought an Airline Ticket Just to Look for His Lost Luggage

A passenger in Ireland bought a ticket just to get into Dublin Airport terminal’s baggage claim to look for his luggage when it was still missing after a week.

Dermot Lennon arrived back in Dublin on June 28 after a trip to Brisbane, Australia, but had to leave without his luggage, he told RTÉ’s Claire Byrne Show on Friday.

He went back on July 4 since his luggage was still missing and he wasn’t getting any answers after calling the airport.

However, Lennon still couldn’t retrieve his bag after spending the entire day at the airport on July 4 because authorities were only allowing a limited number of people to enter a restricted zone for luggage. There were also security checks involved, slowing down the process.

Lennon described the entire situation as “completely chaotic.”

He decided to buy a ticket so he could go directly from departures to baggage claim the next day: “I went onto the website, and I got the cheapest ticket I could,” which he said was a ticket to Glasgow, Scotland, for 18 euros.

Lennon went back again on July 5 and managed to get his bag back — after a few hours of navigating the airport before eventually getting to the baggage claim area.

“The place was littered with bags,” he said, with “thousands of them all over the place.”

“I saw some of them were from June 15, I think there was even one was from June 2,” he added.

But Lennon wasn’t the only one who took the unusual step of buying an air ticket to get his luggage back: He said he met an American on July 4 who had done the same thing — for €300, Lennon told the radio show. 

Dublin Airport Authority did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment but told the Irish Mirror it doesn’t handle any luggage for any airline at Dublin Airport. “This is undertaken by the airline directly or by their third-party ground handling company,” it told the media outlet.

A source at Dublin Airport told RTÉ’s Prime Time around 300 bags arrive on the wrong flights every day — ten times more than before the pandemic.

The entire aviation industry is dealing with a messy summer travel season, with flight delays and chaos as demand has returned to pre-pandemic levels.