Lost Baggage

Lost Baggage

article about lost baggage really isn't funny. It's more a cautionary tale. Perhaps these statistics will act as a warning to split your clothes between two suitcases, especially if travelling with a family group.

I expect you know of someone who has lost baggage on a flight. The reason that we guess you know of a friend or relative who has lost a suitcase is that 1 in 100 people lose baggage. Here is a report by Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautiques', better known as SITA.

30 million pieces of airline luggage, approximately 1%, will go astray this year.

SITA who monitor baggage in over 200 countries, said virtually all missing bags would be returned to their owners within an average of 31 hours. However about 200,000 pieces (less than 1%) would never be found because they are lost or even stolen.

Francesco Violante, managing director of SITA said the air transport industry spent about $2.5 billion a year tracking and returning luggage. Part of this figure went on compensating passengers for lost items. More bags are going missing due to airport congestion, short transition times, and switches from one airline to another.

What are needed is better systems which can link bags to their owners. SITA concluded that the number one cause of late-arriving bags was mishandling when luggage is transferred between flights. This accounted for 62% of hold-ups in 2009.

Secondly was failure to load bags at the departure point, this made up 15% of delays. Attaching the incorrect destination tags at check-in accounted for just 3 percent.