London, April 4:

It may claim to be the world’s favourite airline, but when it comes to maki-ng sure passengers and th-eir bags arrive at their destination together, British Airways (BA) is rather less impressive.

A study of major European airlines reveals today that BA has the worst record for losing travellers’ luggage. Figures released by the UK’s consumer wat-chdog for aviation show that 23 bags went missing for every 1,000 passengers carried by BA. That was

the worst performance out of the 24 airlines which submitted their datafor official scrutiny.

The UK’s Air Transport Users Council (AUC), whi-ch published the figures, said that BA had admitted its baggage handling last year was not acceptable and it apologised to customers who had been affected. But the carrier also claimed that changes to British airport security last August had led to more bags being handled and a striking increase in the numbers going astray.

The AUC said more than 5.6 million bags went missing last year from flights run by the 24 carriers — which are all members of the Association of European Airlines — an average of 15.7 for every 1,000 passengers. Other poor performers included Lufthansa of Germany, Air France, Italy’s Alitalia and KLM of the Netherlands.

A total of 85 per cent of the mishandled bags were returned to passengers wit-hin 48 hours, but this me-ant that about one million took more than two days to reach their owners and so-me were never found.

The AUC also said that actual figure for European carriers could be even worse because some AEA members, such as Virgin and Atlantic, do not provide luggage data.