The treaty behind every international baggage claim: which trips it covers, the five articles that matter, the SDR limit in dollars, and the three deadlines.
If any flight on your ticket crossed a border, the Montreal Convention of 1999 governs your baggage claim. It applies to the whole trip, including a domestic connection on the same ticket, and it overrides the airline’s own terms wherever they say less.
What it says. The airline is liable for checked baggage that is lost, delayed or damaged while in its care (Article 17). Liability is capped at 1,519 SDR per passenger, about $2,081 (Article 22). A bag not delivered within 21 days of the date it should have arrived may be treated as lost (Article 17(3)).
The deadlines (Article 31 and 35): written complaint within 7 days of receipt for damage; within 21 days of receipt for delay; and two years from the date of arrival to bring a claim in court. Miss the written-complaint deadline and the airline can refuse the claim outright, so the letter matters more than the phone call.
You do not need to cite the treaty to be covered by it, but a letter that does tends to be answered by someone who knows the rules rather than by a template.
Work out your own claim → Two minutes to your amount and deadlines.
Any carriage where the place of departure and the place of destination are in two different countries that are parties to it, or in the same country with an agreed stop in another. That is nearly every international ticket sold in the United States. A trip from Chicago to Paris with a connection in Atlanta is one international carriage from end to end, so the Atlanta leg is covered too, even though it never left the country. A separate ticket for a purely domestic flight, bought on its own, is not.
The Special Drawing Right is a unit the International Monetary Fund maintains from a basket of currencies, so the limit keeps a steady value across countries that use different money. The limit was 1,519 SDR from 28 December 2024, raised from 1,288 SDR under the treaty’s five-yearly inflation review. At 1.37 US dollars per SDR that is about $2,081; the IMF publishes the daily rate and a claim letter should state the rate it used. Some airline pages still print the old 1,288 figure. Cite the current one.
Yes, wherever the contract says less. Article 26 makes any provision that relieves the airline of liability or sets a lower limit null and void. An airline term that caps baggage at a lower figure, excludes categories of items, or imposes a depreciation table is not binding on an international trip. The contract can add to your rights, and its reporting windows still matter as evidence, but it cannot take the treaty’s minimum away.
No. The Convention is the law the airline’s claims desk works under; a written claim that cites the right article and the current limit is usually enough. Court is the backstop, with a two-year window, and small-claims court is where the rare stubborn case ends up. Airlines almost always settle before that.
Yes. The whole journey on one ticket is international carriage.
Nearly every country with scheduled airline service, including the United States, Canada, the UK, the EU, and most of Asia and Latin America.