Baggage tagged with "limited release"
- By
- Aparna Patel
- |
- 3 Aug, 2023
- |
Limited Releases are applied to baggage that the airline considers to be at higher risk for damage during flights and transfers. They often apply it to large sporting goods, fragile items, poorly packed items, all ready damaged items and others.
Due to the low weight of your bag vs its size, they likely were afraid that it would be fragile and therefore subject to being damaged. The lightness could contribute to the risk of it getting knocked out of automated baggage conveyor systems, blown off luggage carts and run over, etc.
Ultimately once they have marked your baggage with a limited release, they won’t cover damage of any sort, but as Eugene mentioned, they do cover complete loss. Very few get you to sign the release anymore even though the space is there, and while perhaps a good lawyer could pick it apart in court, one has to figure if is it worth the cost of a good lawyer to claim back a few hundred for your damaged baggage.
Here’s my limited understanding of limited release 🙂
Baggage is basically divided into 3 categories: baggage that the airline will accept, baggage that it will not accept based on its rules, and baggage that it will only accept if you agree to “limited release”: I.e. they will only accept the piece of baggage if you agree, in writing, to release the airline from liability for your baggage.
The release is “limited” only to a specific condition – i.e. if there was a problem because of the weight of your bag, they wouldn’t be liable, but if they misrouted your baggage and it ended up on the other end of the globe, they would still be responsible – it’s not a “complete” release.
In any case, when they want limited release, they will generally make you sign something (generally there’s space for it on the luggage tag). If you didn’t sign anything and they just marked it “limited release” by themselves, I doubt it has any effect – perhaps they wanted you to sign it, but then changed their mind when you added more weight to the bag?
But of course I’m not a lawyer, and all this could depend on the laws of the country where you’re flying, etc, so take all this with a grain of salt. Perhaps there are some places where an airline can just decide on “limited release” based on e.g. some fine print in the contract of carriage that gives it the right to do so, even without your signature.
Credit:stackoverflow.com‘
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