In less than two weeks my lovely wife and I will be celebrating 2 years of marriage. She arrived home this morning after a two week visit with her parents in Crimea. During her visit, Borispol struck us again. It's an interesting story.
My wife and her daughter left here two weeks ago on Delta with a stop in Atlanta and then on to Newark where she boarded LOT-POLISH for a trans-atlantic flight to Warsaw with a connection to Kiev. There she caught an overnight train to Simferopol.
I took them to the airport and produced two sets of reservations, one for Delta and the other for L-P which I had secured earlier. I asked the Delta ticket agent to please check her baggage all the way to Kiev and she happily agreed. Everything went fine until my wife arrived in Kiev and one bag was missing. She asked the L-P agent about the bag and lady agent wrote a "missing bag" report and told my wife when they found it she would have to return to Borispol from Crimea to get it. When she arrived at her parent's home she called L-P at Borispol. They didn't have the bag. I called later after her arrival to make sure she arrived okay and was told the story, so I called Delta and explained the bag was missing and if they had it to just return it here. Their computer indicated they passed it off to L-P. That evening my wife sent me an email and explained that the L-P agent even took the routing strips from her remaining bags and removed the baggage claim stickers from her ticket pouch. All kinds of red flags went off in my head and I returned in the email that her bag was not lost, it was blatenly stolen right there in Borispol and the L-P agent was covering for it.
Being more than slightly irritated over the matter, I called the Delta baggage service and explained what happened and stated that my wife now had no way to prove the bag was hers if found. I then asked if they recorded the claim numbers....they do, they gave them to me, and I emailed them to my wife. While talking with Delta I explained that I really didn't think the bag would turn up because it was evident it had been stolen by a baggage handler in Kiev and the Lot-Polish agent was covering. The lady at Delta Baggage explained to me that on her computer, Lot Polish was indicating that my wife received all her bags and that none were missing. Then she asked if my wife had a missing baggage claim. I replied "yes, and through the modern miracle of email I have a copy and I am looking at it right now". I also explained that I tried to enter the number on the Lot-Polish web site for "delayed baggage" and it kept telling me the claim number is invalid. The Delta lady then explained the standard format for claim numbers but I just couldn't make the numbers on my wife's claim fit the pattern.
To end the story, my wife got a call at her parents home from Lot-Polish at Borispol. They had the bag. When she retrieved the bag, the small padlock on it had been cut off, the contents were a mess, and some items were missing. My wife said when getting the bag from the L-P agent it was clear the lady didn't want to return the bag.
Guys, I don't know the "rest of the story" but I'm sure that Delta Airlines somehow put a choke hold on Lot-Polish and their agent at Borispol was told to produce the bag or she would no longer have a job. I have been critical about Delta before because I basically felt they really don't care about the comfort and needs of their passengers. For a while at least, they are my hero.
Also, be careful at Borispol. Earlier, a dishonest security guard took me for a $50 "export fee" there because my wife was leaving while wearing jewelry.
