Are airlines not liable for damages and losses to the contents of luggage?

Question

When picking up my bag from baggage claim at SXF, I realized that it's upside down. The ID sticker was on the bottom, and inside it was a mess. At home, I found one item broken, a marmalade glass:

See the dent in the lid. This is not a damage that happens with normal treatment.

To see what happens when I complain, I contacted easyJet, and asked for reimbursement. Their response, translated by me to English:

Regrettably, easyJet is not liable for the loss of money, jewelry, silverware, samples, business documents, electrical devices, or other valuable goods, independent of circumstances. Special rules apply to fragile and perishable goods like food.

The original document is barely comprehensible, in a language that only resembles German:

Does that mean that easyJet is not liable for damages to the contents of luggage?

Answer 1

The exact liability an airline will have for lost or damaged baggage is dependent on the airline (specifically, its Contract of Carriage or equivalent document) and the applicable laws of the country/countries involved.

In general, airlines are indeed liable for both the bag and its contents. For the specific case of easyJet, their liability policy says:

16.5 Damage to Baggage

The following conditions apply to all carriage of Baggage by Us:

16.5.1 in respect of Hold Luggage, We shall be liable to You for its destruction, loss or damage during the time it was in Our charge and to the extent that damage did not result from the inherent defect, quality or vice of the Baggage;

However, their baggage policy says (emphasis theirs):

19.4.11 You should not include in Your Hold Luggage fragile or perishable items, money, jewellery, precious metals, silverware, computers, electronic devices, negotiable papers, securities or other valuables, business documents, passports and other identification documents or samples and we accept no liability for them save as stated in Article 16.5.3 (Baggage, Damage to Baggage).

Oddly, Article 16.5.3 specifically refers to cabin luggage, not hold luggage:

16.5.3 We are not liable for any damage to Your Cabin Baggage to the extent caused or contributed to by Your negligence;

I suspect they meant to say Article 16.5.6, which says (emphasis mine):

16.5.6 We are not liable in any event in respect of loss or damage to Baggage which is not permitted to be carried pursuant to Article 20 (Dangerous Goods) or for any fragile, valuable, perishable articles or articles not packed in suitable containers that have been packed in Your Baggage contrary to the requirements of Article 19.12 (Baggage, Items Unacceptable as Baggage).

I would assume that Article 16.5.6 constitutes the 'special rules' they referred to in their response to you.

Answer 2

The airline is definitely liable for the contents as well but that's not what the answer you received is about. For example, you can get compensated if your luggage is lost completely and not only for the price of a new bag. But airlines do not have to accept liability for valuable items (unless you declared them as such) or improperly packed, fragile or perishable items. And apparently they are arguing that they are not responsible in this case simply because marmelade is food.

For you might be surprised by what counts as “normal treatment” for hold luggage. It all comes down to how you packed it, the mere fact the glass was broken really does not prove anything out of the ordinary happened. Next time you travel, fully expect your luggage to be thrown around, turned upside down several times, fall some distance from one conveyor belt to the next, hit other pieces of luggage, be stacked on a cart with four-five heavy bags on top of it, etc.

Beyond that, I don't know whether the details of easy jet's conditions of carriage or their application in this case would hold up in court but my personal experience with low-cost airlines is that they will keep you in a holding pattern with boilerplate answers and are even less helpful than legacy airlines (which could offer you something, not because they are liable but simply as a commercial gesture). The problem is that escalating things beyond an email (e.g. hiring a lawyer) is likely to be too costly to make sense, even if you had a strong case, which you do not.

One last option is to turn to social media. Airlines are sometimes more responsive that way, to avoid public shaming.

Incidentally, and without giving too much weight to some poorly translated boilerplate text, “unabhängig von den Umständen” presumably refers to the things listed in the first sentence, i.e. valuable items, not to everything you could have in your bag.

Answer 3

I don't know how things are in Germany or the UK, but in the United States you would never be able to recover for that in a court of law in a million years because the item was made out of glass. You can't just put glass unicorns worth millions in a piece of luggage, hand it to a baggage handler and expect to collect from them when it breaks, because the item is fragile. In English common law a bailment only creates a liability for foreseeable damages. Some kind of hidden vulnerability in the goods is solely the fault and responsibility of the bailee.

Of course, we are talking about Germany (?) here, which uses a different set of laws, which might be charitably called "whatever the hell the magistrate wants" laws. In countries under Napoleanic code type laws like France and Germany, there is no rule of written law, but everything is at the whim of the judges. Judges in such countries tend to be very hostile to plaintiffs.