3 ms·
Wow, it can be way more common to lose your bag than I would have thought -- on Aer Lingus, a 1 out of 57 chance! (While Delta is 1 in 497, and Air France is 1
by crazygringo 2y ago
Wow, it can be way more common to lose your bag than I would have thought -- on Aer Lingus, a 1 out of 57 chance! (While Delta is 1 in 497, and Air France is 1 in 1,256 -- more what I expected.)
But the national aspect is seemingly even more interesting -- in India you have a 1 in 97 chance, while in the US it's 1 in 497, and in Japan it's 1 in 7,734.
Now I'm incredibly curious to know what the real, actual culprits are. To what extent is is about the check-in airport or connecting airport that loses it, to what extent is it about airline policies around how luggage is handled, and to what extent is it national regulation that sets standards for airline performance, airport performance, or both?
Because the amount of variation here is just astounding and far, far, beyond anything I would have guessed. I would have naively figured that lost luggage was at a relatively "economically efficient" level and would therefore be pretty similar across airlines and countries... when clearly that is not the case at all.
- vlovich123 2y agoOr just plain theft at the airport?
- ohmyiv 2y agoSince the source seems to be social media posts, there's a small possibility that theft may be some kind of portion of the number, but I'm not sure due to the questionable accuracy of source data. Semi-related: I work for a homeless service agency and a few of our clients were arrested for a tiny luggage theft ring at LAX a couple of months ago. One of the detectives said that some of the luggage they found was reported missing and it was luck that someone else had airtags hidden in their luggage to be able to track the item which allowed them to discover more items from others.
- bobthepanda 2y agoafaik in Japan it's pretty common to use the takkyubin system while traveling where you forward your luggage, so I wonder if that has anything to do with it. https://en.japantravel.com/guide/takkyubin/31203 https://en.japantravel.com/guide/takkyubin/31203
- Tepix 2y agoMaybe. Or maybe Japanese travellers don't complain about their lost luggage on social media like Indian travellers do?
- bobthepanda 2y agothere is also the whole, do Japanese people even use Twitter to the same extent? Particularly in East Asia you usually see usage of homegrown platforms (LINE in Japan, KaoKao in Korea, the networks behind the great firewall in China)
- barbegal 2y agoI think you're missing that the source of the data is social media posts. So garbage data in, garbage data out.
- netsharc 2y agoSomeone can just create a Twitter account, tweet that $airline lost their luggage, and skew the statistics.. considering there's some magic maths in the background...
- bdlowery 2y agoLet's be honest, how likely is that going to happen? "There's 102 people who die in a car accident everyday. Someone could have just been struck by lightning while driving and skewed the statistics so that number isn't entirely accurate" cmon bruh
- netsharc 2y agoIf the 102 number is based on social media mentions... then that's just garbage statistics.
- mike_d 2y agoIt says it is normalized against actual published lost baggage statistics. You can calculate a ratio of social media complaints to lost bags for airlines you have data on and then infer a loss rate for airlines that don't release data.
- avree 2y agoThe US DOT publishes "Mishandled Baggage" statistics. These lump together lost and damaged, but for example states that Delta was around a 1 out of 256 chance to get "mishandled"... so, I'm not sure if the stats on this page are really all that far off - they seem all within the range of believable to me.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]