Lost Luggage at CDG or Orly: What to Do Next

Before you leave the baggage hall

One rule matters more than everything else on this page: declare the missing bag before you exit the reclaim area. The moment you pass through customs and into the arrivals hall, you leave the zone where the loss can be recorded on the spot, and everything that follows becomes slower and harder to prove. However tired you are, however tempting the exit doors look, this is the ten minutes to spend now.

Find the baggage service counter for your airline — or for its handling agent, since at CDG and Orly many carriers delegate this desk to a ground company whose name you will not recognise. It sits inside the reclaim area, usually near the carousels, and is signposted "Baggage service" or "Litiges bagages". Tell them the bag did not arrive, and ask them to open a Property Irregularity Report, the PIR. This is the official record of the loss: a file reference of letters and digits that identifies your case in the worldwide tracing system. Without it, as far as the airline is concerned, nothing happened.

One trap sends tired passengers to the wrong desk entirely, so let us be precise. A bag that did not come off the aircraft is the airline's problem, handled at its baggage counter inside the reclaim area, before customs. The airport's lost property office deals with something else altogether: items forgotten in the terminal itself — a coat on a bench, a phone at security, a passport at the gate. Report a missing suitcase to lost property and you will lose precious time being redirected, because the two services do not share files. If it travelled in the hold, it belongs to the airline's desk. Full stop.

Before you leave that counter, make sure you hold four things:

• the PIR file reference, plus the phone number or tracking link the desk gives you for follow-up;
• the small baggage tag receipt stuck to your boarding pass at check-in — it carries the number the entire tracing system runs on, so do not discard it with the boarding pass;
• a photo of the bag on your phone, if you have one;
• the delivery address confirmed in the file: where you will actually be sleeping tonight, not your home address on another continent.

For airport-side questions, Paris Aéroport answers on 3950 from France (0.35€/min) and +33 1 70 36 39 50 from abroad, and its official luggage and lost property page explains both services. But for a bag that did not arrive, the number to call first is always your own airline's baggage service — it is printed on the declaration receipt you have just been handed. Then, and only then, walk out.

What the airline must do, and what it will not

The bag was in the airline's care, so the airline is responsible for it. In practice that means two things. First, tracing and returning it: once the case is located, carriers generally arrange delivery to the address on your PIR — your hotel, your apartment, wherever you told the desk you would be. Second, compensation: under the Montreal Convention, which governs international carriage, you can claim for reasonable essential purchases made while you were without your belongings — toiletries, a change of clothes, the things you genuinely could not do without.

The convention also sets a ceiling. Since 28 December 2024, the carrier's liability for baggage is capped at 1,519 Special Drawing Rights (SDR) per passenger, raised by 17.9% from the previous 1,288 SDR under ICAO's five-yearly revision. Two details are counter-intuitive and worth reading twice. The cap is per passenger, not per bag — two lost suitcases do not double it. And it covers delay, loss and damage together: what the airline reimburses for essential purchases during the delay draws on the same ceiling as any later claim for a bag never found.

What is that in euros? The SDR is a basket of currencies maintained by the IMF, and its exchange value moves every day. As an order of magnitude, 1,519 SDR is the equivalent of roughly 1,700€ to 1,900€ depending on the day's rate — treat any fixed euro figure you read elsewhere with suspicion, and check the current rate before building expectations on it.

The timetable is the other trap. The PIR opens the file, but the convention expects a written complaint to the airline afterwards, within short deadlines:

• 21 days from the day the bag is put at your disposal, in the case of delay;
• 7 days from receipt, in the case of damage;
• a bag that is never traced is, as a general rule, treated as lost after 21 days — at which point the claim changes nature.

Everything above runs on paper. "Reasonable" and "essential" are words the airline interprets, procedures vary from one carrier to another, and no receipt means no reimbursement: keep every proof of purchase, however small, and confirm with your airline — in writing if possible — what it will cover and how to submit the claim.

What the airline will not do is manage your evening. It will not hold your pre-booked transfer while you queue at the baggage desk, and it will not always spare you a return trip to the airport if delivery to your address proves impossible or too slow for your plans. Which brings us to the part of this situation nobody prepares for.

Lowering the odds on your next flight

You cannot load the aircraft yourself, but you can shift the probabilities. The single biggest lever is the itinerary: with transfers behind 39% of mishandled bags, a direct flight — or a connection with a generous layover rather than a sprint between terminals — removes most of the risk in one decision. If your bag has to change aircraft in under an hour at a major hub, it is running a race you cannot watch.

The rest costs five minutes at home. Photograph the packed case before you leave, outside and open. Put a card with your name, phone number and email inside the bag, where no conveyor belt can tear it off. Make the case identifiable from across a carousel — a coloured strap, a ribbon, a band of tape — which also stops another tired passenger walking off with it in good faith. And keep the check-in tag receipt until you and the bag are reunited; it is the number the entire tracing system runs on.

Finally, pack as if the hold might let you down once in your travelling life. One change of clothes, chargers, valuables and every medication go in the cabin bag. If you are landing for a wedding, a board meeting or a race, the outfit that cannot be replaced flies with you. Do that, and a delayed suitcase becomes an errand instead of a crisis.