QANTAS leaves your luggage out in the rain

My husband and I returned from a recent wedding in Queensland. Our flight with QantasLink from Gladstone to Brisbane was very good. We spent about an hour at Brisbane Airport watching the torrential rain outside before our flight to Sydney with Qantas, another pleasant experience.

However, on retrieving our bags from the carousel in Sydney we noticed the outside of each was quite damp. When unpacking at home that night, I found all the contents wet, including our wedding clothes. (Imagine if this had happened on the forward journey!) Every item in my bag had suffered some sort of water damage ranging from damp to saturated.

It seems obvious that our bags had been left uncovered, exposed to the rain on the tarmac somewhere at Brisbane Airport.

I emailed Qantas for an explanation and, to its credit, a customer service representative phoned me a few days later, apologising for our inconvenience but without any real explanation of why it happened and future measures to prevent a recurrence. She sent us a voucher for dinner at a restaurant by way of recompense but I would rather have heard that they are now covering their luggage trolleys at all times.

Lynne Hutton, April 2

I read the letter about waterlogged luggage (Traveller, April 2) with a wry smile. Five years ago my wife and I had a similar experience flying from Port Macquarie to Sydney and then Hong Kong.

Arriving at our hotel in Hong Kong we began to unpack our bags to find that everything saturated. For three days our hotel room looked like a laundry with clothes drying everywhere. I complained to Qantas and received two $100 travel vouchers. It appears that nothing has changed in five years. Don't fly with them on rainy days!

Roger Pearman, April 17, 2010