When I browsed the web site of an airline I use for a way to complain about a bug in their booking algorithm I happened on the following statement on this page:
At dba less than 1% of luggage transported is lost irretrievably.
This strikes me as a ridiculously high rate (in the context of critcal fault rates in an established, standardized business process): If they claim less than 1 %, the number cannot be much lower (i.e. if it were lower than 0.5% they’d surely say ‘lower than 0.5 %’), also if almost 1 % of checked baggage is irretrievably lost that surely means that several per cent of baggage is temporarily lost.
For example on my last flight (737-300, almost full, checked baggage allowance 2 pieces) there must be more than 100 pieces of checked baggage. Imagining that on such a flight on average one piece of baggage is irretrievably lost, and several are temporarily lost, just isn’t credible to me.
Surely loading/unloading airline baggage is not rocket science. Routing and delivering letters is definitely more complicated and if the post office were to claim that At Deutsche Post less than 1% of letters transported are lost irretrievably it’d be torches-and-pitchforks time for their management.
Google searches for loss rates didn’t find me hard numbers (probably I used the wrong terms). Can anyone enlighten me on standard airline loss rates for checked luggage?
I fly about 4 - 5 times a year and have had my luggage lost permanently 5 times in 8 years. It has happened to my wife 3 times and my inlaws a few times as well. I can certainly believe those numbers.
At least 1/3 of the flights I take, I have luggage lost or seriously delayed (meaning a day or more). Three years in a row, my wife and I went to see my parents for Christmas and our luggage did not arrive until days after Christmas and our gifts to everyone were in them. They lost all out luggage in the Virgin Islands this summer for 2 days but we eventually got it back.
Believe it. I know I am exceptionally unlucky but I have stood in those lost luggage lines enough to know that it isn’t a rare event. Most big flights have people just standing there staring when the luggage carossel stops.
My reference to 1/3 of flights should be read as 1/3 of the complete round-trips including all connecting flights. I fly rountrip 4 - 5 times a year and those involve many more actual flights. The loss rate is still absurd though and I do everything I can and it doesn’t always work.
One huge weak point is when you have to rush from a connecting flight to your next one. Your luggage often doesn’t have time to make it. If that is the last flight to the destination for the day, you are probably out of luck and things get really risky. Once your bags get mixed up in that black hole caused by seperation of luggage and passenger things go into the unknown and you may get them delivered by courrier the next day, 3 days from now, or never.
I fly 30 to 40 round trips a year and I have never had a bag permanently lost. Plenty have been delayed or misplaced, pretty close to that 1% number, but none lost.
On one memorable occasion I was trying to fly from Albany, NY to Aukland, NZ as a blizzard made its way east. As each of my connecting cities closed down, I switched airlines to try to make my flight. By the time Albany shut down, I had been booked on three separate airlines, and never left the airport.
My bag however, could not be found. I never left the airport, and neither had my bag, but it was lost. They found it the next day.