American Airlines self-reported a baggage mishandling rate just short of 1% this year. That seems really high to be honest, when you consider that most planes have a minimum of 150 passengers.

2022 was an anomalous year since the airlines ramped up their schedules without having support staff at the airports to handle it. The statistics seem to indicate a tripling of lost luggage rates.

For international trips this is close to 10%.

My math professor is flying once a month to Europe from the US for the past 20 years. He told me about this statistic he built from his trip history and I thought he was exaggerating.

On my 10th trans-Atlantic trip of course I lost my luggage.

So on a typical 747 flight 40 people will have their luggage lost when we get to the reclaim? That seems really improbably high. How come I don't see hundreds of people standing around getting angry at the belt?

At Heathrow, it'd mean 20,000+ people a day with lost luggage (if they all checked luggage). You'd need more than the entire taxi fleet of London to get their luggage to their hotels.

Really doesn't pass a common-sense check.

Bags are lost often enough there’s a charity selling the bags that never get claimed.

https://www.unclaimedbaggage.com/pages/how-it-works

They say a 3 month search, but if you read around you’ll see 5+ days and your bag is basically gone. They say .03% of all checked bags end up lost and then unclaimed. How many must get lost to reach that unclaimed number?

It could be as high as 10% if you have a connecting flight, maybe? I’ve been fortunate enough to always fly direct and never had any lost baggage. I’ve always assumed direct is fine, it’s once you start transferring loads across different flights and codeshare carriers it starts to do awry.

Of course - but it's an indication of the ludicrous scale.

Two "nines." Not acceptable in most products/services.

Asia and the US have a much better track record than Europe. Like, your bag is 5-8x more likely to get lost in Europe.

It's been a big issue in the UK for the last few months, as airports struggled to find enough baggage handlers. So luggage was getting left all over, massive buildups, effectively "lost" until they have enough manpower to process it all.

Nah. They didn’t have issues finding baggage handlers. They couldn’t find enough baggage handlers for the low wage they were offering.

It still happens. In a lot of cases they find it and go through some efforts to deliver the luggage to where you’re staying.

> through some efforts to deliver the luggage

I was in Greece once dealing with lost luggage. The airline threw it on a ferry and told me to run on and look/grab my bag when it got to the island I was on. I guess that’s some effort lol

And, this time I had AirTags in my bags which ended up being super useful for tracking.

It’s happened enough to me flying intl, that I refuse to check now. One time FinAir lost my bags for so long, I was thinking they were gone forever.

It happens and just like the meme they drive it hours to you once found, even across states. Just happened my sister and brother in law who had trained to another state by the time theirs was found.

I visited Germany in July. At the time Frankfurt airport was a huge mess.

https://newsrnd.com/business/2022-07-08-travel-chaos--5-000-...

Edit: improved source and removed misleading numbers from previous article

Antidotally my personal delayed luggage rate is about 15% (~100 segments a year, checking bags on about 1/5th of those)

I'm not sure what airlines you're flying with, but I've never gotten any notifications like this - in the US or Europe.

United does it, for example. You need the app. I'm sure other airlines do it as well?

AA does.

Huh. In the last few weeks I've travelled with AA, Southwest, Ryanair, Aer Lingus and Lufthansa, and never got any baggage updates in their apps.

Maybe it’s only at specific airports? I was notified in the app