Whenever I take an airplane trip and check my bags they hand me this little ticket, and on the back it says, “This is not the baggage check described in the Warsaw Convention.” Funny, it sure looks to ME like a baggage check. If it’s not a baggage check, what is it? And what do you have to do to get a REAL baggage check? –Bill Kinnersley
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You’ve already got one. Look on the back of your airline ticket. It says, “PASSENGER TICKET AND BAGGAGE CHECK.” I know, doesn’t look like a baggage check, doesn’t act like a baggage check. Tough. In modern commerce, lawyers rule. According to the Warsaw Convention (see below), possession of the baggage check/ticket legally entitles you to possession of whatever belongings you handed over temporarily (you hope) to the airline pursuant thereto. As a practical matter you also need the little cardboard stubs with the numbers on them (the ones that claim they’re not baggage checks, appearances to the contrary) to satisfy the guard at the exit from the baggage claim area. But the stubs are merely an administrative convenience. When the airline loses that duffel bag you packed the gold bars in, and you make a claim, and they deny it, citing the limitation of liability rules that aren’t stated (clearly, anyway) on the back of the ticket but that you have to mail in to get, and you’re outraged and take the case to the Supreme Court–and whether you win or not the lawyers wind up with 99 and 44/100ths of the proceeds–you want the check for the $0.15 left over to be sent to you, the one who bought the ticket, not the yope who picked up the cardboard stub you threw on the floor in disgust when they lost your bag in the first place, right? Right. So don’t let a little incongruous terminology upset you.
You goof, you’re thinking of the Warsaw Pact, the former Eastern-bloc military alliance. Or maybe Warsaw, Indiana. Whatever, the Warsaw Convention of 1929, formally known as the Convention for the Unification of Certain Rules Relating to International Carriage by Air, wasn’t an attempt by the Comintern to impose its will on the rest of the world. Rather, it was the nascent air-transport industry and its government allies imposing their will on you, Joe and Joan Consumer.
