Calculator

What does lost luggage actually cost?

The airline calls it “mishandled baggage”. You call it “a ruined week”. This calculator estimates the real personal cost of a delayed or lost bag — replacement essentials, insurance excess, time on the phone, and the contents value the Montreal Convention won’t cover. Free, no email required.

Currency

Outcome

Delayed by 1–2 days, then returnedThe most common outcome. Bag arrives after 24-48 hours of essentials-buying.Delayed by 5+ days, then returnedA longer delay — costs scale linearly with reimbursable interim spending.Officially lost (still missing after 21 days)Treated as lost under Montreal Convention. You claim the contents value.

Bag contents valueReplacement cost of everything in the bag (clothes, toiletries, electronics).

Hours of paperwork & phone timeWe default to 3 hours total; long-haul lost-bag claims often run to 8+. Valued at £20/hour.

Estimated personal cost

£360

Replacement essentials (2 days): £200
Travel-insurance excess: £100
Your time on phone & paperwork: £60

This is a planning estimate, not a quote. Actual costs depend on your specific airline, insurance policy, and how quickly you can replace what was inside. The Montreal Convention currently caps airline liability at 1,288 SDR (≈ £1,300) per passenger.

You can’t stop a bag going astray. You can drastically shorten the recovery.

A BagBeacon QR tag turns the airline rep, hotel concierge or kind stranger who finds your bag into the person who reunites you with it. They scan, tap once to share their location, and up to five contacts you’ve nominated get an SMS with what3words coordinates accurate to ~10 metres. Most reunions happen within a few hours of the first scan.

From £2 a month for two bags. Cancel anytime, free 3-month pause once a year if you only travel seasonally.

Tag your bags

How the calculator works

Lost-luggage cost has four real components, in roughly this order of impact:

Replacement essentials.Underwear, toiletries, a clean shirt, work-critical items if your laptop bag was the one that went astray. Reasonable spending in the £80–£120 / $100–$160-a-day range is normally reimbursable under Montreal Convention rules — but only against receipts, and only after you’ve filed a Property Irregularity Report at the airport.
Travel-insurance excess.Most policies have a £50–£150 / $75–$200 excess that you pay even on a successful claim. If you don’t need to claim, you don’t pay this — another reason to buy what you can with airline-reimbursable receipts first.
Your time. Phone calls to the airline, escalations, complaint letters, insurance paperwork. Three hours is a low estimate for a delayed-bag claim; eight or more is normal for a lost-bag claim. People who have been through a serious claim consistently say the time cost was the worst part, not the money.
Contents value above the Montreal cap. Airline liability is currently capped at 1,288 SDR (about £1,300 / $1,700) per passenger under the Montreal Convention. Anything in the bag worth more than that is your travel insurer’s problem, and most insurers have per-item caps that exclude the most expensive items entirely. If you had a £2,000 camera in the bag, you might recover the first £1,300 from the airline plus whatever your policy schedules for cameras specifically.

The calculator combines these. Tweak the inputs to match your situation; the maths runs in your browser, no data leaves your device.

The hidden cost the calculator can’t price

The numbers above are the things you can put a receipt against. They miss the bigger problem: a missing bag turns the trip you planned into a stressful logistics exercise. You spend the first day shopping instead of doing what you went there to do; you check the airline’s tracker before falling asleep; you change hotel and have to phone the airline back to update the delivery address. The financial cost is recoverable. The trip you planned isn’t.

That’s the real reason a smart tag pays for itself. The reunion happens hours after the bag is found, not days — which means the holiday you planned still happens.

How much should you budget for prevention?

Across the smart-tag market, the rough rule is that a year of cover should cost less than a single day’s replacement essentials — otherwise the economics don’t work. Specifically:

Apple AirTag— one-off ~£35 / $29, no subscription. Best for iPhone households, tells you where the bag is inside its network.
BagBeacon— from £2 / $2.50 a month for two bags (about £24 / $30 a year). The QR-and-SMS service that tells the person who finds the bag how to give it back — up to five contacts alerted, what3words coordinates to ~10 metres. The active recovery workflow, not just the passive tracker. See how BagBeacon works.
Travel insurance with luggage cover — £30–£100 / $40–$130 a year for an annual multi-trip policy with reasonable luggage cover. Pay for it; it’s the fallback when the airline cap leaves you exposed.

The combination — an AirTag inside the bag, a BagBeacon QR on the outside, and a sensible travel-insurance policy — costs under £100 / $130 a year and covers all three failure modes. The first time you actually lose a bag, that year of cover saves you the equivalent of several years’ worth.

FAQ

How much does lost luggage actually cost?

For a delayed bag returned within 24-48 hours, expect £200-£400 / $260-$520 in replacement essentials plus your time. For a bag delayed 5+ days, costs scale to £600-£900 / $780-$1,200. For a bag officially lost (still missing after 21 days), the floor is the airline's compensation cap — currently 1,288 Special Drawing Rights, roughly £1,300 / $1,700 — plus everything above that you'd had in the bag.

What's the Montreal Convention cap and why does it matter?

The Montreal Convention caps an airline's liability for lost or damaged baggage at 1,288 SDR per passenger (about £1,300 / $1,700 at recent exchange rates). If your bag's contents are worth more than that, the airline isn't liable for the difference — your travel insurance covers it, up to whatever per-item caps your policy specifies. The combined airline + insurer cover usually exceeds the Montreal cap.

How accurate is this calculator?

It's a planning estimate, not a quote. The cost model uses commonly-cited daily essentials benchmarks (£100 / $130 a day, tapering after 3 days), typical travel-insurance excesses, and an approximate hourly rate for your time on phone and paperwork. Real costs depend on your specific airline, your specific insurance policy, and how quickly you can find replacements where you are.

Does this include the time cost of dealing with it?

Yes — by default it adds 3 hours of phone-and-paperwork time at £20 / $25 an hour. Long-haul lost-bag claims often run to 8+ hours of accumulated time. You can adjust the hours field to match your situation. People who've been through a long claim consistently say the time cost was the worst part, not the money.

Can a smart luggage tag prevent this?

It can't prevent the bag going astray — the airline's barcoded sticker is what its sorting system uses. But a QR tag like BagBeacon dramatically shortens the recovery window once a human finds the bag, which is most of the cost. Reunions that take days through the airline's call centre often take hours when the finder can scan a QR and message you directly. The £2 / $2.50 a month subscription pays for itself the first time something goes wrong.