Airlines lost my checked baggage twice this year. Luckily, that was one less than 2023, and both vanished on the homeward leg only to be dropped at my door three days later.
Others haven’t been so lucky. One friend thought squeezing in a weekend in the Maldives before an international conference in Delhi couldn’t hurt, but her bags arrived in Malé two days after she’d left for Delhi, still wearing the same clothes she’d left home in.
Another friend was delighted when his lost luggage caught up with him three days after he’d arrived in the Masai Mara in Kenya. He opened the case expecting to see his safari kit and found instead colourful designer shirts and a selection of sarongs. Presumably at the exact same moment a horrified guest at some glitzy beach resort was discovering khaki shorts and a sweat-stained bush hat.
Luggage is rarely actually lost in the airline industry. It’s merely delayed or mishandled, and according to the aviation IT provider Sita, the world’s airlines are nowhere near as bad as they used to be. In 2007 the world’s carriers lost 18.9 bags per 1,000 passengers. By 2023 that had dropped to 6.9 per 1,000, even though the total number of passengers carried had more than doubled — and 92 per cent of mishandled bags were reunited with their owners within three days.
But stats mean nothing when you’re watching an empty carousel, late at night, in some foreign land. That’s most likely to happen if you took a connecting flight, says Sita: 46 per cent of all missing bags are those that haven’t been taken from one flight to another at a transit airport. Four per cent, according to Sita, go astray because they’ve got the wrong tag, so if you’re using a self-service bag drop at the airport, check that your name and the correct destination are on the label before you attach it to your luggage.
Where you fly from also matters. The software developer Pieter Levels has deployed bots to scour social media channels 24/7, searching for complaints about lost luggage. The data he collects has allowed for the creation of a ranking website at luggagelosers.com.
“Airlines don’t publish live lost luggage data, probably for a reason,” he says. “Using social media as a data source has limitations but seems to be a good proxy indicator when combined with historical lost luggage data. Probabilities and lost bags are live estimations.”
The worst airport on the Luggage Losers list is Charles de Gaulle in Paris, where according to Levels there’s a 1 in 314 chance of your bag going missing. Next is Indira Gandhi airport in Delhi (1 in 383), followed by Gatwick (1 in 412).
The worst country is the Netherlands, according to luggagelosers.com, with a 1 in 309 chance of your luggage not appearing on the carousel. India and Switzerland come next, with the UK 12th worst out of 40 nations surveyed.
As for the airlines, analysis of data collected from social media posts suggests there’s a 1 in 145 chance of Air India misplacing your bag. KLM is second worst (1 in 309), then the low-cost carrier IndiGo (1 in 408). British Airways is seventh (1 in 656), and if you see those odds as reasonable, consider Southwest Airlines (1 in 5,559) and Saudia (1 in 5,907).
If your bag is one of the 5 per cent that is never found, you have rights. The Montreal Convention is the international treaty governing airline liability for loss or injury. In the case of lost, damaged or delayed luggage, that liability is limited to just over £1,000 — but the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) warns “it would be very rare for you to receive this much”. As for consequential losses, such as missing a cruise because you were waiting for your bag to catch up, “this will not routinely be refunded,” says the CAA. “You would have to take legal action and ask a court to award this extra compensation.”
In 1985 the global airline industry adopted a communications protocol called Type B messaging, using teletype machines to transmit, among other things, lost baggage inquiries.
Luggage is rarely lost, it’s usually just mishandled or delayed
GETTY IMAGES
Four decades later, Type B is still in use, which goes some way to explaining why your missing suitcase might arrive on the last day of your holiday. In 2018 the industry body IATA adopted resolution 753, requiring airlines to adopt radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to allow all checked bags to be tracked by passengers on all stages of the journey.
• Lost, delayed or damaged luggage? Your compensation rights explained
Yet few airlines have invested in the tech, and so far only American, Delta, Southwest Airlines and United offer free baggage tracking through their apps.
This month Air Canada and United Airlines announced that passengers using Apple AirTags will be able to share data from the tracking devices via the Find My app to assist airlines in finding mishandled baggage. British Airways, Virgin and Qantas are among 15 other carriers that have already signed up.
Tracking devices have been tried before. Pre-pandemic, both Turkish Airlines and British Airways were selling personalised, reusable RFID tags — the BA version cost £80 — but since the devices didn’t work for connecting flights with other airlines, both schemes have been quietly retired.
The AirTag solution could be more successful, but how long will it be before an invitation to share data becomes an obligation to self-track, allowing airlines to shift the responsibility for finding lost bags to the passenger?
And don’t be surprised when airlines realise they can monetise our baggage fears by offering passengers who don’t own Apple’s £35 AirTags the option to pay a small priority bag tracking fee along with those for speedy boarding and extra legroom.
Has an airline ever lost your luggage? Share your experience in the comments
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