Hello all
I would like to share with you what I have found out recently. I used to travel a lot by air but never really knew my rights until recently when the airline "displaced" my bag for the whole holiday. I got it back once I arrived home. I travel with 2 kids (3 months, 3 years) and my wife. You can imagine the stress once we found out most of our clothes are not with us...but enough about that lets get to the point.
There are 2 categories for compensations: US internal flights and international flights
US flights I will not cover as I'm not from US but I checked out the law and it is even more strict (no bullshit from airlines allowed) and more generous (up to 3x) than international one.
International flights:
You are covered by Montreal convention (for most developed countries) and in some countries by Warsaw convention as they did not sign Montreal convention which means you are not in luck (less compensation as it is based on weight and not contents so not much room to negotiate)
Compensation for delayed bags
Montreal convention states that the airline must compensate you for the delayed bag (12h+) in amount up to 1000 SDR (google the conversion to your local currency) and in case you are flying from EU it was changed to 1131 SDR to include inflation. Most airlines will not tell you this but will offer you small compensations or tell you that they give out fixed amount of money based on number of passengers and delay time which is illegal as they are not allowed to limit nor add additional restriction on the law itself.
Keep all receipts as you will need them when making claim then wait for them to give you a settlement offer which will be the minimum amount they have written in their terms of service. Write back refusing the stupid offer and tell them what I wrote above and you will quickly get a revised offer which will usually be 50% of the receipts you gave them. At this point you will need to decide if it is worth going for 100% (consider your time spent) as they can give you 100% of money back but will ask you to give all the bought items to them (which might not be what you desire).Same laws/conventions are valid for lost bags as well. Here you will need to state what was in the bag and give proof of purchase. Of course all this is false and they just try to make you miserable (who keeps the receipts for all clothes...) and give up on the claim. You could potentially give them any CC statements from any purchases as they have no ways to prove you did not have that item in the bag so the whole idea is stupid from the start. What they don't state is that they need to cover also immaterial damages (it is in the Montreal convention) which means you will always go for the max 1131SDR compensation and get it as long as you state that you are aware of this.
Downgrading class
If they place you in a lower class that what have you bought they need to compensate you in 7 days:
30 % of the price of the ticket for all flights of 1,500 kilometers or less
50 % of the price of the ticket for all intra-EU flights of more than 1,500 kilometers, except flights between EU countries and the French overseas departments, and for all other flights between 1,500 and 3,500 kilometers
75 % of the price of the ticket for all other flights, including flights between EU countries and the French overseas departments
There are also compensations for delayed flights but I will cover this in another post as it is quite complicated and based on a lot of factors.
Hopefully this information will be of use to someone and prevent future scamming by airlines by raising awareness.