The luggage warranty gap when the airline breaks it

Luggage is sold on long warranties and destroyed by people who did not sell it. A suitcase spends its working life being thrown onto belts, dragged across aprons and crushed under other bags. When it comes back broken, the damage is usually not a manufacturing defect, the customer did not cause it, and the party that did has its own liability regime with its own limits and its own deadlines.

Two exclusion lists that cover the same parts

Read a brand warranty and an airline’s conditions of carriage side by side and the overlap is uncomfortable.

IndiGo’s domestic Conditions of Carriage state that it assumes no liability for wear and tear to checked-in baggage, then define that to include broken wheels or base, loss of external locks or security straps, damage to any protruding part of the baggage, damage resulting from over-packing, damage to retractable luggage handles, scratches, torn zippers, straps and handles scuffing, denting, soiling or manufacturing defects, damage to perishable or fragile baggage, and any other wear and tear.

Air India tells passengers that luggage will acquire minor cuts, scratches, scuffs, stains, dents, soil or other normal wear and tear that does not affect the functionality and usage of the bag, and that it is not responsible for that, nor for damage to overpacked or oversized bags, bags with fragile or perishable items, or baggage with manufacturing defects.

Look at what both lists name. Wheels. Handles. Zips. Protruding parts. Those are not incidental items, they are the only parts of a suitcase that move, and they are where luggage actually fails. Both carriers also expressly exclude manufacturing defects, which routes those claims to you. Your warranty almost certainly covers manufacturing defects and excludes airline handling damage, which routes those claims back to them. The two documents point at each other, and the customer stands between them holding a broken wheel.

What the airline actually owes

When the airline is liable, the amount is capped, and the cap is lower than most customers assume.

On domestic carriage, IndiGo’s Conditions of Carriage put its liability for loss, damage, destruction and delay of checked-in baggage at INR 350 per kg, subject to a maximum of INR 25,000 per passenger, unless the passenger makes a special declaration at check-in. It cites Notification No. S.O. 3129(E) dated 22 August 2019, issued by the Ministry of Civil Aviation under the Carriage by Air Act, 1972. That ceiling is per passenger and it covers the bag and everything inside it, so a damaged suitcase competes with its own contents for the same money.

On international carriage the Montreal Convention applies. India gives it force of law through the Third Schedule to the Carriage by Air Act, 1972, read with Section 4A of that Act. Section 8 is the provision that lets the Central Government apply the rules to carriage which is not international carriage, subject to exceptions, adaptations and modifications, and that is where the rupee figures above come from. Under Article 22(2) of the Convention the limit for destruction, loss, damage or delay of baggage was originally 1,000 Special Drawing Rights. The five-yearly review that ICAO conducts under Article 24 raised it to 1,288 SDR, and then to 1,519 SDR with effect from 28 December 2024.

Seven days, and the customer does not know

The deadline is what quietly kills most claims. A complaint about damage to checked baggage must be made in writing within seven days of receiving it. Before that, the customer has to raise it in the arrival hall and obtain a Property Irregularity Report. Air India instructs passengers to report damaged or pilfered baggage to its personnel there.

Almost nobody does this. The bag goes into a car, the trip ends, the wheel is noticed a week later, and the customer contacts the brand because the brand is the only party still answering. By then the airline route is shut, and the whole weight of the claim lands on your goodwill budget.

Which makes the most valuable thing your first responder can do extremely cheap. When a customer reports damage that happened on a flight, tell them in the first reply to file a report at the airport before leaving the arrival hall, and to send the airline a written complaint within seven days. This is not deflection. It preserves the customer’s second route to recovery, and every rupee recovered there is a rupee of pressure off yours.

The exclusion you cannot adjudicate

Here is the harder problem. Airline handling damage is not covered is a clean sentence and an undecidable test.

A wheel that sheared off may have sheared because a handler dropped the bag from a belt, or because the bearing was defective from the factory. From a photograph, neither you nor the customer can tell which. The Convention carries the mirror image of the same problem: Article 17(2), reproduced in IndiGo’s conditions, relieves the carrier where the damage resulted from the inherent defect, quality or vice of the baggage. So if the airline argues defect, the claim comes back to you, and your own exclusion pushes it straight back out.

An exclusion that cannot be settled at the point of claim is not protection. It is a queue of arguments, each one costing agent time, photograph requests, escalations, and very often a discretionary settlement at the end anyway.

Write the tier instead of the argument

The way out is to stop making causation the gate.

Wheels, handles, zip pulls and feet are modular parts. Price them as a paid or part-paid repair tier available regardless of cause, published next to the warranty, with a stated price and a stated turnaround. Keep the free warranty for what it was always for, which is defects. A customer told that this is a handling repair, it costs this much and it takes this long, has a decision to make. A customer told to prove it was not the airline has a fight to pick.

Then count the two paths separately. If handling repairs on one model run far above the rest of the range, that is a design signal about wheel mounting or handle housing, not a warranty cost. A wheel that survives an Indian baggage belt is a product specification, and the only way to learn it is to count the claims you decided not to argue about.