Madrid Airport Strike: Why My Suitcase Stayed in Barajas

At first I assumed I'd walked into the big Spanish Groundforce strike, the one with Menzies everybody wrote about in spring. Wrong assumption, as it turned out.

The Madrid airport strike that's actually been running for months is narrower. The people striking are the maintenance crew for the automated baggage system, SATE, at Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas. They work for two contractors, Outsmart Assistance and Totseriman, and the union behind it is ASC. The pattern: every Thursday, Friday and Sunday, twice a day. Most recently extended through 30 September 2026.

SATE is the machinery that takes your bag after check-in, hauls it across half the airport, sorts it and gets it to the right aircraft. When the people who keep that machinery alive walk out, the plane still goes. The bag is a different question.

The strike windows are nastily placed, too. The Spanish transport ministry's official minimum-service order keeps at least 50 percent of staff on duty, but the walkouts run from 5 to 7 in the morning and from 1 to 3 in the afternoon. Which is exactly when the morning wave and the lunchtime wave get processed.

My flight home? Friday, early afternoon.

"Minimum service" sounds reassuring. It isn't. It only means the whole thing doesn't stop dead. Search for a "spain airport strike" right now and you'll mostly find the big spring wave, not this narrower SATE action that caught me out.

Spring gave everyone a preview of what that looks like: over 1.3 million travellers affected, average delays of almost an hour per flight, thousands of bags that went unloaded or arrived late (sources: sonnenklar.tv, UGT via Berliner Zeitung). Different action, different companies, different weekdays, but the same underlying mechanic: fewer people, an automated system, a backlog.

So at the belt in Düsseldorf I did the obvious thing. Baggage service desk, boarding pass and bag tag in hand, filed a PIR. That's the Property Irregularity Report, the piece of paper without which nothing later works. Wrote down the reference number. Done.

That standard line about the bag turning up on the next flight is, in my experience, mostly wishful thinking on a strike day. Mine did come back. Not that day, and not the next one either.

Here's where it gets interesting about the Madrid airport strike, and honestly I only worked this out afterwards.

When a strike delays or cancels your flight, airlines like to reach for the "extraordinary circumstances" defence under EU passenger rights rules. With a strike by external staff they often get away with it. As aviation lawyer Dr. Matthias Böse explains, a walkout at an outside contractor such as a ground handler is treated differently from a strike by the airline's own staff, and it can qualify. The European Court of Justice pushed things in that direction in case C-28/20.

But that's about the flat-rate compensation for the flight. Not about your bag.

Baggage runs on an entirely separate instrument, the Montreal Convention, and that one has no force majeure exception at all. Germany's consumer body Verbraucherzentrale puts it plainly: even during strikes or system failures, the airline is liable for your luggage, because the Montreal Convention allows no exception for force majeure.

Two claims, two legal bases, two completely different answers. An airline can wave the strike at you for the flight and still owe you for the suitcase. The liability ceiling for baggage currently sits at 1,519 Special Drawing Rights, roughly 1,900 euros. Plenty of advice sites still quote 1,288 SDR. That's the old figure from before the late-2024 revision.

I'm not a lawyer, and individual cases probably differ. My own lost luggage experience is only one data point; for how you actually file, which deadlines run and what evidence you need, our reference guide on your rights when luggage is lost or damaged covers it properly. No point repeating it here and turning a travel story into a statute.

One thing I will repeat: the deadlines are short. Really short. Filing the PIR once you're home at the kitchen table is already too late.

Two things changed since then, and neither is clever.

Every bag I check now has a tracker in it. Not because a tracker brings the suitcase back, but because it ends the argument. When mine went missing, nobody could tell me for days where it even was. A Apple AirTag (2. Generation) 4er Pack: Tracker für Schlüsselbund, Portemonnaie und mehr: Ortungsgerät mit Ton, einfache Einrichtung mit einem Klick über iPhone oder iPad, Schlüsselfinder, Genaue Suche in the inner pocket means you check for yourself instead of trusting a tracking portal that has learned nothing since check-in. Sounds like a small thing. Takes a surprising amount of stress out.

When I can get away with it, I don't check a bag at all

The second one is slightly annoying and probably the more useful of the two. On a strike day in Madrid, the safest suitcase is the one that never touches the belt.

For a long weekend a cabin-sized backpack does the job for me now. The MATEIN Reiserucksack Handgepäck Flugzeug 55x35x20 stays within 55x35x20 cm, costs about as much as a single checked-bag fee on a budget flight, and was genuinely enough for four days in Madrid.

And when the airline measures more strictly than you'd think

Not every carrier lets 55 cm on board. With tighter allowances, Easyjet for instance, the bigger format gets awkward fast, and you end up paying at the gate.

So there's a second backpack in my cupboard. The KLOSTAIN Handgepäck Rucksack 45x36x20 für Easyjet stays under those stricter limits at 45x36x20 cm and clears more airlines because of it. Less volume, fewer arguments.

And yes, I now book around Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays whenever a Madrid airport strike is even a possibility. Feels a bit silly. Costs me nothing.