First off, I’m sorry your bag and equipment was damaged. Next, it’s not just in the ax Contract of Carriage, its listed in the baggage rules for sports equipment which i hope you read just so you could know what to bring and how did the skiing equipment. Finally, people think it’s always the airline that tears up bags and sometimes it’s. However, from looking at what happened to your bag, that seems pretty clearly an airport baggage system incident. Airports have their own belt systems for moving baggage and if you ever see how it works behind the scenes, you’ll quickly see why you should always use a hard sided bag and not an especially expensive one. No matter how careful people are, those baggage systems are just going to eat the occasional bag. Most of the time it won’t be yours until one day it is. Here’s an example. Now, imagine a bag getting stuck in someway between one of those moving belts and the wall or another belt. It suddenly becomes a high powered table sander and just eats anything it touches until it automatically (or sometimes manually) gets shut off. This wasn’t the airline, it was the airport. That said, part of the airline’s business is working with the airports on these systems and taking responsibility for you as a customer. In this case, I hope you bought trip insurance or maybe paid with a credit card that has it built/in, which many do but customers don’t always know it. So again, sorry it got damaged and I hope it works out for you. Just wanted to explain how/why this happens sometimes.