The honest version: what each service costs, who stays the claimant, what happens after the claim is sent, and when the other one is the better choice.
Often not. The airline owes what the rule says whether or not anyone helps you ask, and the letter you would write yourself is in the guides with the current limits filled in. A service earns its fee on the part people abandon: the follow-ups when the airline goes quiet, the reply when it offers a voucher, the second claim to the card benefit or the insurer with the airline’s letter attached. If you will do those yourself, see what your airline owes you and file it.
The same five things on each page: what it costs to start, what the fee comes to on a real recovery, who remains the claimant, what happens after the claim is sent, and what each service does not do. Competitor figures are read from their own public pages on the date stated on each page and corrected when they change.
With a flat fee, the fee stays paid unless the service refunds it; BagBack refunds the $49 plan if you recover under $147. With a percentage, you pay nothing and the service has absorbed its costs, which is why it charges a third of the successful cases. BagBack’s pay-when-it-pays plan sits between the two: $0 to start, and nothing is charged unless the airline pays. Each comparison page states what happens on each side when the airline says no.
Take a delayed bag that the airline eventually pays $1,200 for. With AirHelp’s 35% the fee is $420 and you keep $780. With My Bag Claim the fee is the plan you bought, $29, $49 or $149, whatever the airline pays, so you keep $1,051 to $1,171. With BagBack on the pay-when-it-pays plan the fee is 25%, $300, and you keep $900; on the $49 plan you keep $1,151. Take instead a claim the airline refuses outright. AirHelp charges nothing. My Bag Claim keeps its fee. BagBack charges nothing on the pay-when-it-pays plan and refunds the $49 plan because the recovery is under $147. The pages set these out side by side so the choice is arithmetic, not marketing.
It does not take the claim over: you remain the claimant and you press the button that sends anything. It does not go to court for you; where a case needs a lawyer it says so and steps back. It does not handle flight delay or cancellation compensation, which is AirHelp’s core business and a different rule. It does not sell a concierge tier that prepares small-claims filings, which My Bag Claim does. What it does is the part between the airport and the payment: the number, the letter, the claim address, the replies, the follow-ups, and the card-benefit and insurance claims that pay what the airline did not.
Usually yes, and it happens more often than people expect: a template bought elsewhere, a letter sent, then silence from the airline and no one watching the inbox. BagBack can take a claim from that point. Enter the trip, the contents and the date the first letter went, and the case picks up with the follow-up rather than starting over; the airline’s earlier file reference and any reply you have are attached as evidence. A claim already assigned to a percentage service is a different matter: read the assignment before signing anything else, because two parties cannot pursue the same claim.
Each comparison page carries the month its competitor figures were read from the competitor’s own public pages. They are re-read when a reader tells us something has changed and at least once a quarter; a figure that cannot be verified is removed rather than left standing.
My Bag Claim is built for the same person as BagBack, a US traveler with a baggage problem, on a flat-fee model. AirHelp is the largest name in air passenger compensation and the benchmark most people have heard of, even though its core product is flight delay rather than baggage. Between them they cover the two choices a traveler actually weighs: pay a flat fee and file, or hand the claim over for a percentage.