This past February, a bottle of red wine accidently fell off the cart and spilled onto my shearling coat and pants. The flight attendant gave me a damage claim form -- it took me over 6 months to get a response but they finally paid me for the cleaning ($135) and then even offered to replace my pants ($70) even though I didn't claim it.

So I'm just posting to encourage people to be persistent -- it was a real pain to track down the right person who'd deal with me. I was at two different ticket counters at the airport, given several wrong #'s, no response to my fax, etc. but they finally came through.

I'm happy that they did finally come through for you.

It is amazing that an airline like this does not take care of problems quickly. Our trip to Germany was totally marred by Lufthansa and their ineptness and for filling out numerous reports and complaints they sent us a food basket. Very nice food basket but not what should have been sent.

bookmarking

ok, I admit that was pretty funny.

total time spent opening and reading --3 seconds, plus I got to laugh. IMO, not the worst use of 3 seconds. ymmv

On flight on Lufthansa I got some black grease on my white cashmire sweater from the seatbelt. The "customer service" told me that I shouldn't have worn an expensive sweater on a flight in the first place. They only offered to pay for cleaning even after I explained you cannot dry clean axel grease out of a white sweater. I still get a tad angry when I think about it.

seaurchin -- what a lousy response, I would have been angry too! Sometimes you can reach the right person who is totally professional and responsive but they are usually several times removed from the front lines of customer service. Our first point of CS contact is usually clueless, untrained, and poorly paid -- most of us give up out of frustration. I think it's something that the corporations actually count on -- that we'll go away after a while.