6 ms·

Unclaimed Baggage Center: The Shop for Lost Luggage (2015)

35 points by apsec112 9y ago

telesilla 9y ago
I'm on a plane at least once a month these days, and I have never lost a bag in all my 20 years of international travel. Am I just lucky?
- jackweirdy 9y ago
  There's always some risk, though the level is definitely reducing as airport systems get better at handling the edge cases. But even taking into account the improvements there, there's still a bunch of sleep deprived humans at the end of your 12 hour redeye who are happy to take your bag if it looks a bit like theirs (this happened to me even though I covered my bag in unique stuff...)
- minikites 9y ago
  I've had bags get misrouted and delayed, but I wouldn't consider that "lost". Are you saying you've never had an instance when you didn't have your bag in baggage claim right when you landed? One time my bag was delayed by a day and an airline representative delivered it to my home, which was nice. Another time I volunteered to be bumped in exchange for a voucher but my bag was already loaded so it arrived significantly before I did.
  - telesilla 9y ago
    Oh yes, I've had bags delayed and sent to wrong destinations, and taken other people's bags and had my own taken: but they've always found their way back to me. And it's not happened in years since I suppose technology really improved.
- astura 9y ago
  TFA says airlines are mostly really good at getting bags to their owner - only .01% of bags become unclaimed. It's been an embarrassingly long time since my undergraduate statistics class, so the math might not be 100% correct, but I'd like to attempt it anyway, be sure to tell me if I'm wrong: Worst case, you fly twice a month for 20 years, that's 480 flights. Each flight is a round trip, so baggage is entered into the airlines systems 960 times in 20 years. If the probability that an airline gets your baggage to you each time is 99.99% .9999^960 = .9085 1-.9085 = .0915 So, if my calculations are correct, in 20 years time, there's a 9.15% of chance your bags having be lost at least once. Assuming that the odds of an airline losing all bags are the same - and they are obviously not.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    I suspect that the (vast?) majority of people who travel that much don't check luggage regularly. The exception being people who need a lot of gear for whatever purpose they're on the road for all the time. Personally, I'm on dozens of flights a year and I only check luggage for a handful of those flights. Anecdotally, luggage does miss connections on a fairly regular basis and if there are airline changes/international flights involved, it may take a few days to track a bag down. But I've never had a bag lost permanently and I can't remember the last time I've heard someone I know complaining about that happening. I think my parents in all their years of travel may have lost a bag permanently once. ADDED: The statistic in the article doesn't really say what percentage of luggage is lost though. The quote is “Less than one-half percent of bags are ultimately unclaimed." So this is the case where they have the luggage but can't figure out who the owner is for whatever reason. Presumably other bags are just lost--probably most typically stolen.
    - lfowles 9y ago
      The only luggage I've lost (temporarily!) has been carry-on which ended up being gate checked. It was explained that during handling the gate check tag came off.
    - astura 9y ago
      TFA was solely about luggage that was permanently lost, not temporarily. I was answering the GP's question if they are just lucky or if they can expect lost luggage with 20 years of regular travel. The answer is: the odds are highly in your favor of not having an airline lose your bags, even after 20 years of regularly entrusting your bags to the airline.
- hourislate 9y ago
  I am on a plane once a week and refuse to check anything. I pack light and take it with me on board. Yesterday for the first time in like 3 years I checked a bag and it never made it. They changed gates on me 3 times in a span of 6 hours due to a storm that passed through DFW. It's not lost but it never made one of the gate changes. Lucky it just had some booze ( one of the reasons I had to check it, TSA Rules) in it and a few items that were not that important for my trip. Rule 1 - Pack light and just bring a carry on if possible. Rule 2 - If you are connecting try not to check any bags. Rule 3 - If checking a bag make sure you tag it with your flight number, home address, destination address, phone number, and record locator number (this one is important). I can't wait for the day of fully autonomous cars. Anything within 8-10 hours driving would replace flying for me. My trip was a 2.5 hour flight and took 12 hours to get there before it was all over.
  - gbacon 9y ago
    Complete a private pilot certificate with an instrument rating for good measure and fly general aviation?
- kalleboo 9y ago
  Not on a plane, but I've forgotten a bag on a train once. Lost a bunch of dirty clothes I was bringing home to wash at my parents place. The train companies answer was "call lost and found at the 3 major train stations along the line [one of which is in another country] as well as the police in the 3 cities". Never got the bag back.
- jsjohnst 9y ago
  > Am I just lucky? The only one “lost” permanently (had many lost temporarily) was put on an earlier flight than mine. Fairly likely wasn’t lost by airline / airport, but rather stolen. Conveniently the cameras near that carousel weren’t working that day.
- Symbiote 9y ago
  I make about 6 trips a year, and last year my bag was completely lost after a tight connection at Paris. The value of the luggage was much more than I would have expected - clothes add up in cost - but the work travel insurance covered everything. It was a hassle re-buying all the stuff I don't use very often, after I'd put that task off for over a month hoping the bag would turn up somewhere.
  - astura 9y ago
    If your not travelling for work, some credit cards come with lost baggage insurance too, especially "travel" cards and those with an annual fee. Check your credit card documents! That being said, I believe, IIRC, the airlines are supposed to compensate you some amount when they lose your bag. You're right though, clothes really add up, especially if your stuff is higher end
    - Symbiote 9y ago
      Air France compensated me €70, which didn't even cover my bag, after losing my claim twice. I wanted them to pay, since they lost the bag, but it took so much time going through their convoluted systems that eventually I had to accept I was wasting work time, and should claim on the work insurance.
- oligopoly 9y ago
  More likely you don't travel with enough valuables which is smart or aren't wealthy enough.
0x9000 9y ago
it is in their business interest to NOT find any personal information (since then they would have to return the items), so I presume they just quickly discard any papers or other things found in the bag, and reformats the laptops without looking at them first. I mean, how likely is it that a laptop has NO personal information on it?!
- tbihl 9y ago
  Are you expecting them to boot from a flash drive and snoop through files? That just doesn't seem a realistic expectation, nor even one I would want them to be doing.
  - minikites 9y ago
    Would you consider paging through a paper notebook to be the same level of effort and/or privacy concern? I don't think paging through paper notebook is that far removed from going into the user's (probably only one) documents folder and looking for something like "hist301 final paper.doc" to find someone's name. If the paper notebook starts to look like a personal diary, you stop, in the same way you don't click on "company secrets.doc"
    - oarsinsync 9y ago
      Flipping through a paper note book takes seconds. Given the timeframes, suspended laptops will have flat batteries. Timeframe is now several minutes just to find the charger, plug in and power on. One of these can occur simply by accident depending on how you pick it up. The other requires wilful actions. Levels of effort / concern for privacy are exponentially different.
- gbacon 9y ago
  Having layers (first the airlines and then Unclaimed Baggage) makes it not just twice as unlikely but thousands of times less likely that belongings will be stolen in the way you describe. Managers of a family-owned business in operation for nearly fifty years have to have low time-preference and future orientation enough to realize that scamming an expensive item would be foolish when they have an entire warehouse of legitimately acquired merchandise. Moreover, the goodwill from a story about reuniting a sentimental memento or a hard-to-replace valuable (“That laptop had the only copy of my dissertation!”) is most certainly in their business interest.
joshvm 9y ago
In Beijing airport, as you leave immigration, there's a box with a sign saying "take a free lighter" or something to that effect. These are lighters which have presumably been confiscated at security. Seems better than chucking them given that many people in China smoke. (The stats are really staggering: 60% of men, 7-10% of government revenue, 1 million deaths attributable per year.)
- mcguire 9y ago
  The Texas state government has a store in Austin (there may be others in other cities) where you can wander in and buy used office equipment and such (I got a sweet filing cabinet) and lots and lots of pocket knives. Including, occasionally, collectible ones worth some amount of money. That's where they go when they're confiscated at the airport.
  - therein 9y ago
    They should have these kind of stores at all major airports. It would be a huge attraction and I would look forward to going and seeing if there are any nice gems in the confiscated items.
mattlondon 9y ago
I left a tablet in a seat-back pocket earlier this year. I phoned the airline, they had found it, I was able to positively ID it (work asset-tag/barcode + a few notable dents/scrapes etc) and was generally relieved. Due to logistics they had to forward it on to London Heathrow for me since I was not passing through Helsinki airport where they had it. ~40 euros to get my work tablet back - bit steep but ok, sure, I'll pick it up when I get back to Heathrow. But then they lost it somewhere between Helsinki Airport and London Heathrow! Trying to get through to anyone has been an absolute nightmare - no one knows anything, airlines have no idea where the lost property goes, the lost property offices (there are several different & unrelated lost property offices at Heathrow!) have no idea what is coming from where or from who or from what airlines. Its chaos and everyone just shrugs their shoulders - the Helsinki people just said "we sent it to Heathrow - its there somewhere" (I guess they've never been to one of the largest airports in the world with 5 terminals). One of the lost property offices in heathrow wont even let you contact them - how the hell is a lost property office that you cant contact supposed to work?! Its really infuriating. It sickens me to think of my work tablet that was lost, then found, then paid to be sent back home, then lost again, then ending up for sale somewhere like this just because of pure disorganisation, incompetence, and slopey-shouldered "not my problem pal" attitudes. I really dont believe any comments from airlines et al saying they try "really hard" to re-unite lost items based on my experience. I wonder how much of that stuff in that store should have reached its owner but was lost again due to screw-ups or people just not giving a crap. Sigh. </still-have-a-chip-on-my-shoulder-about-this>
- wink 9y ago
  I once left a Kindle in the the seat pocket and noticed promptly after deboarding, just late enough to not be able to go back. Went to the retrieval company (it was not the lost&found office, at MUC there's a small office by one company that seems to exclusively handle this sort of stuff) and they phoned someone. The result was that the cleaning crew had just been in there and nothing was reported found. :/
  - Symbiote 9y ago
    With the time the cleaning crew had to clean a plane, I wouldn't be surprised if they really didn't find it, and the passenger in the next flight took it. (A child was sick on me once, and I helped her dad clean up a bit. We joked to the cabin crew that they'd need to get some extra cleaning, and they essentially said that wasn't going to happen until the end of the day, and even that wouldn't be thorough.)
mcguire 9y ago
"...at this family-owned store than takes up an entire city block." "City" is perhaps overly generous for Scottsboro. I honestly have no idea why this business is out in the middle of nowhere, but I'm happy that it is. There's not a whole lot else going on here. (Although I understand they've actually broken ground on Google's data center.)
- gbacon 9y ago
  North Alabama represent!
jacquesm 9y ago
I only take handluggage. That's ever since my checked in suitcase ended up in Kuala Lumpur instead of in Toronto. Since then all my luggage is what I can carry on. Besides being substantially faster on the far side it really forces me to think about what I will take with me and whether I really need it. Switching to a Macbook Air running Linux made this a lot easier (before that it was a Lenovo Battle Axe).

35 points by apsec112 9y ago

I'm on a plane at least once a month these days, and I have never lost a bag in all my 20 years of international travel. Am I just lucky?

jackweirdy 9y ago
There's always some risk, though the level is definitely reducing as airport systems get better at handling the edge cases. But even taking into account the improvements there, there's still a bunch of sleep deprived humans at the end of your 12 hour redeye who are happy to take your bag if it looks a bit like theirs (this happened to me even though I covered my bag in unique stuff...)
minikites 9y ago
I've had bags get misrouted and delayed, but I wouldn't consider that "lost". Are you saying you've never had an instance when you didn't have your bag in baggage claim right when you landed? One time my bag was delayed by a day and an airline representative delivered it to my home, which was nice. Another time I volunteered to be bumped in exchange for a voucher but my bag was already loaded so it arrived significantly before I did.
- telesilla 9y ago
  Oh yes, I've had bags delayed and sent to wrong destinations, and taken other people's bags and had my own taken: but they've always found their way back to me. And it's not happened in years since I suppose technology really improved.
astura 9y ago
TFA says airlines are mostly really good at getting bags to their owner - only .01% of bags become unclaimed. It's been an embarrassingly long time since my undergraduate statistics class, so the math might not be 100% correct, but I'd like to attempt it anyway, be sure to tell me if I'm wrong: Worst case, you fly twice a month for 20 years, that's 480 flights. Each flight is a round trip, so baggage is entered into the airlines systems 960 times in 20 years. If the probability that an airline gets your baggage to you each time is 99.99% .9999^960 = .9085 1-.9085 = .0915 So, if my calculations are correct, in 20 years time, there's a 9.15% of chance your bags having be lost at least once. Assuming that the odds of an airline losing all bags are the same - and they are obviously not.
- ghaff 9y ago
  I suspect that the (vast?) majority of people who travel that much don't check luggage regularly. The exception being people who need a lot of gear for whatever purpose they're on the road for all the time. Personally, I'm on dozens of flights a year and I only check luggage for a handful of those flights. Anecdotally, luggage does miss connections on a fairly regular basis and if there are airline changes/international flights involved, it may take a few days to track a bag down. But I've never had a bag lost permanently and I can't remember the last time I've heard someone I know complaining about that happening. I think my parents in all their years of travel may have lost a bag permanently once. ADDED: The statistic in the article doesn't really say what percentage of luggage is lost though. The quote is “Less than one-half percent of bags are ultimately unclaimed." So this is the case where they have the luggage but can't figure out who the owner is for whatever reason. Presumably other bags are just lost--probably most typically stolen.
  - lfowles 9y ago
    The only luggage I've lost (temporarily!) has been carry-on which ended up being gate checked. It was explained that during handling the gate check tag came off.
  - astura 9y ago
    TFA was solely about luggage that was permanently lost, not temporarily. I was answering the GP's question if they are just lucky or if they can expect lost luggage with 20 years of regular travel. The answer is: the odds are highly in your favor of not having an airline lose your bags, even after 20 years of regularly entrusting your bags to the airline.
hourislate 9y ago
I am on a plane once a week and refuse to check anything. I pack light and take it with me on board. Yesterday for the first time in like 3 years I checked a bag and it never made it. They changed gates on me 3 times in a span of 6 hours due to a storm that passed through DFW. It's not lost but it never made one of the gate changes. Lucky it just had some booze ( one of the reasons I had to check it, TSA Rules) in it and a few items that were not that important for my trip. Rule 1 - Pack light and just bring a carry on if possible. Rule 2 - If you are connecting try not to check any bags. Rule 3 - If checking a bag make sure you tag it with your flight number, home address, destination address, phone number, and record locator number (this one is important). I can't wait for the day of fully autonomous cars. Anything within 8-10 hours driving would replace flying for me. My trip was a 2.5 hour flight and took 12 hours to get there before it was all over.
- gbacon 9y ago
  Complete a private pilot certificate with an instrument rating for good measure and fly general aviation?
kalleboo 9y ago
Not on a plane, but I've forgotten a bag on a train once. Lost a bunch of dirty clothes I was bringing home to wash at my parents place. The train companies answer was "call lost and found at the 3 major train stations along the line [one of which is in another country] as well as the police in the 3 cities". Never got the bag back.
jsjohnst 9y ago
> Am I just lucky? The only one “lost” permanently (had many lost temporarily) was put on an earlier flight than mine. Fairly likely wasn’t lost by airline / airport, but rather stolen. Conveniently the cameras near that carousel weren’t working that day.
Symbiote 9y ago
I make about 6 trips a year, and last year my bag was completely lost after a tight connection at Paris. The value of the luggage was much more than I would have expected - clothes add up in cost - but the work travel insurance covered everything. It was a hassle re-buying all the stuff I don't use very often, after I'd put that task off for over a month hoping the bag would turn up somewhere.
- astura 9y ago
  If your not travelling for work, some credit cards come with lost baggage insurance too, especially "travel" cards and those with an annual fee. Check your credit card documents! That being said, I believe, IIRC, the airlines are supposed to compensate you some amount when they lose your bag. You're right though, clothes really add up, especially if your stuff is higher end
  - Symbiote 9y ago
    Air France compensated me €70, which didn't even cover my bag, after losing my claim twice. I wanted them to pay, since they lost the bag, but it took so much time going through their convoluted systems that eventually I had to accept I was wasting work time, and should claim on the work insurance.
oligopoly 9y ago
More likely you don't travel with enough valuables which is smart or aren't wealthy enough.

0x9000 9y ago

it is in their business interest to NOT find any personal information (since then they would have to return the items), so I presume they just quickly discard any papers or other things found in the bag, and reformats the laptops without looking at them first. I mean, how likely is it that a laptop has NO personal information on it?!

tbihl 9y ago
Are you expecting them to boot from a flash drive and snoop through files? That just doesn't seem a realistic expectation, nor even one I would want them to be doing.
- minikites 9y ago
  Would you consider paging through a paper notebook to be the same level of effort and/or privacy concern? I don't think paging through paper notebook is that far removed from going into the user's (probably only one) documents folder and looking for something like "hist301 final paper.doc" to find someone's name. If the paper notebook starts to look like a personal diary, you stop, in the same way you don't click on "company secrets.doc"
  - oarsinsync 9y ago
    Flipping through a paper note book takes seconds. Given the timeframes, suspended laptops will have flat batteries. Timeframe is now several minutes just to find the charger, plug in and power on. One of these can occur simply by accident depending on how you pick it up. The other requires wilful actions. Levels of effort / concern for privacy are exponentially different.
gbacon 9y ago
Having layers (first the airlines and then Unclaimed Baggage) makes it not just twice as unlikely but thousands of times less likely that belongings will be stolen in the way you describe. Managers of a family-owned business in operation for nearly fifty years have to have low time-preference and future orientation enough to realize that scamming an expensive item would be foolish when they have an entire warehouse of legitimately acquired merchandise. Moreover, the goodwill from a story about reuniting a sentimental memento or a hard-to-replace valuable (“That laptop had the only copy of my dissertation!”) is most certainly in their business interest.

joshvm 9y ago

In Beijing airport, as you leave immigration, there's a box with a sign saying "take a free lighter" or something to that effect. These are lighters which have presumably been confiscated at security. Seems better than chucking them given that many people in China smoke. (The stats are really staggering: 60% of men, 7-10% of government revenue, 1 million deaths attributable per year.)

mcguire 9y ago
The Texas state government has a store in Austin (there may be others in other cities) where you can wander in and buy used office equipment and such (I got a sweet filing cabinet) and lots and lots of pocket knives. Including, occasionally, collectible ones worth some amount of money. That's where they go when they're confiscated at the airport.
- therein 9y ago
  They should have these kind of stores at all major airports. It would be a huge attraction and I would look forward to going and seeing if there are any nice gems in the confiscated items.

mattlondon 9y ago

I left a tablet in a seat-back pocket earlier this year. I phoned the airline, they had found it, I was able to positively ID it (work asset-tag/barcode + a few notable dents/scrapes etc) and was generally relieved. Due to logistics they had to forward it on to London Heathrow for me since I was not passing through Helsinki airport where they had it. ~40 euros to get my work tablet back - bit steep but ok, sure, I'll pick it up when I get back to Heathrow. But then they lost it somewhere between Helsinki Airport and London Heathrow! Trying to get through to anyone has been an absolute nightmare - no one knows anything, airlines have no idea where the lost property goes, the lost property offices (there are several different & unrelated lost property offices at Heathrow!) have no idea what is coming from where or from who or from what airlines. Its chaos and everyone just shrugs their shoulders - the Helsinki people just said "we sent it to Heathrow - its there somewhere" (I guess they've never been to one of the largest airports in the world with 5 terminals). One of the lost property offices in heathrow wont even let you contact them - how the hell is a lost property office that you cant contact supposed to work?! Its really infuriating. It sickens me to think of my work tablet that was lost, then found, then paid to be sent back home, then lost again, then ending up for sale somewhere like this just because of pure disorganisation, incompetence, and slopey-shouldered "not my problem pal" attitudes. I really dont believe any comments from airlines et al saying they try "really hard" to re-unite lost items based on my experience. I wonder how much of that stuff in that store should have reached its owner but was lost again due to screw-ups or people just not giving a crap. Sigh. </still-have-a-chip-on-my-shoulder-about-this>

wink 9y ago
I once left a Kindle in the the seat pocket and noticed promptly after deboarding, just late enough to not be able to go back. Went to the retrieval company (it was not the lost&found office, at MUC there's a small office by one company that seems to exclusively handle this sort of stuff) and they phoned someone. The result was that the cleaning crew had just been in there and nothing was reported found. :/
- Symbiote 9y ago
  With the time the cleaning crew had to clean a plane, I wouldn't be surprised if they really didn't find it, and the passenger in the next flight took it. (A child was sick on me once, and I helped her dad clean up a bit. We joked to the cabin crew that they'd need to get some extra cleaning, and they essentially said that wasn't going to happen until the end of the day, and even that wouldn't be thorough.)

mcguire 9y ago

"...at this family-owned store than takes up an entire city block." "City" is perhaps overly generous for Scottsboro. I honestly have no idea why this business is out in the middle of nowhere, but I'm happy that it is. There's not a whole lot else going on here. (Although I understand they've actually broken ground on Google's data center.)

gbacon 9y ago
North Alabama represent!

jacquesm 9y ago

I only take handluggage. That's ever since my checked in suitcase ended up in Kuala Lumpur instead of in Toronto. Since then all my luggage is what I can carry on. Besides being substantially faster on the far side it really forces me to think about what I will take with me and whether I really need it. Switching to a Macbook Air running Linux made this a lot easier (before that it was a Lenovo Battle Axe).