9 bags mishandled per 1,000 air passengers

....It's a numbers game of sorts and most folks are not impacted...

for once it would be nice if 9 of them were really the CEO/CFOs of those airlines and their families.

its fine as long as youre not one of the 9.

happy trails.

I have yet to mis-handle my carry-on!

I stopped giving the airlines the opportunity to mis-handle mine almost 20 years ago.

I always check my bag. So far never any issues. If the airline mishandles my levis, $10 dollar t-shirts, tighty whites, on their last legs socks which I throw away after each hotel, and $30 electric razor....I'll live. All can be easily replaced in any city center with about an hour shopping. YMMV.

Would be interested to know if anything was common to the nine bags. Late check in, size, inspected by security, number of plane changes, class of service, etc., or is it just random. I think nine is a pretty good number.

We had two close calls before I stopped checking. The first was DEN to ORY, no one was around to help, DH finally found it on a cart in a back room. The second was DEN to LHR to EDI - they did find it and delivered it out the next day. That was enough for me - I figured we had used all of our grace and the next one would be gone forever.

You could view this as: 9 out of 1,000 is not bad odds.
I'd take that in most of life's decisions.

We often are long down the road after landing in Europe (with our carry-ons).

I've never seen airline rules about delivering delayed bags. It seems that in any group of 100+ with some making three hop journeys, some ski bags don't get loaded. On our 2012 trip our group's final destination was a two hour 140 km coach ride into Germany. The next year our final destination from VCE was a 1.5 hour 120 km coach ride including toll roads. This year's trip took us 130 km into Austria from MUC. In all three years delayed ski bags were delivered by the airlines to our destination hotel. It appears that you don't need to hang around the airport or can even leave the country and the airline will deliver your bag.

That said, if you really need your checked gear arriving a couple of days early improves the odds of getting your gear when you need it. I prefer to arrive at the gateway city a couple of days early to adjust to time zone and to give my fear a catchup cushion. And I get to be a tourist taking in the sights.

I think in all my flying, I've only had a bag (wife's) not show up. Domestic flight, non-stop and we always check in with plenty of time. It took a day or so and the airline had it delivered to our hotel in a nearby city. Inconvenient but we bought some essentials at Target. I'd never check anything that was critical if I could help it. I usually try and bring a day's clothing in my carryon too.

Or to look at it another way - over 991 bags out of every 1,000 are just fine...

The Reuter's article was poorly written. It seemed to imply that, out of every 1000 people who flew last year, 0.9% had a bag mishandled (lost, damaged, pilfered, delayed). Actually, the source of Reuter's information, SITA, reported that for every 9 out of 1000 passenger "enplaned", a bag was mishandled.

They also reported that the number has been going down in recent years. Well, duh! More and more people (45%) have given up checking bags due to fees and are now carrying on. Carry on bags are not included in the report. If the report had been the percentaqe of bags per enplaned passengers with checked bags, it would have been a lot higher.

9/10% might seem like a small number, but when you consider the number of times you enplane, it adds up. For instance, a couple flying RT to Europe with a change of planes in the US both ways has 8 emplanings and a 7.2% chance of mishandled luggage.

In a little over 2 years, my partner and I have made 12 round-trips, enplaning 41 times. At 9/10% chance of mishandled luggage, we would have had a 37% chance of at least one mishandling, had we not carried on.

Lee said .9% not 9% - there is a decimal before the 9.

I was thinking the number seemed a bit small.

I don't know who "invented" the word enplaned, but SITA uses it and my spell checker accepts it. Anyway, why is what word that is used Germain? The point is that 9/10th% of those who get on an airplane will have a bag mishandled, not 9/10ths of those who are passengers that year.

Actually, it is the chance that your luggage will not be mishandled in a year, which is 0.991 to the power of how many "enplanements" you have made. For 41 enplanements, it's 69%.

Whether the sub 9 per thousand is good or bad did not seem to be the primary take away of the SITA report. The key pointed I read were both the generally improving trend towards a reduction in mishandled bags and more important, that the industry is working at improving that statistic. Its a big cost to the industry that they would like to minimize.

Another interesting statistic is the regional differences. Asia the best, North America in the middle and Europe the worst in terms of mishandled bags. Could it be all those short connections?

The SITA report also noted that most mishandled bags were delayed, not lost, damaged or pilfered.

@Edger, like I said, the reason the number of mishandled bags has been reduced is due to the higher fees being charged by the airlines for a check bag and more bags, consequently being carried on. It's unfortunate that SITA reports mishandled bags per "enplaned passenger", not per checked bag. Actually, it should be per "checked bag passenger". The way it is now, the airline can lose two bags, and if the both belong to one passenger, it only looks like one lost bag.

That would be a more realistic number and probably twice what they now report.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/05/travel/airline-baggage-stats/index.html

CNN) -- Even as some airlines hike bag fees, passengers in the United States almost counter-intuitively checked more bags per person in 2013.
And right on cue, despite a few years of improvements, airlines mishandled more bags per passenger on domestic flights in 2013 compared with 2012, according to TSA and DOT statistics cited by Airlines for America (A4A).
While checked bags per passenger at airport ticket counters increased to 0.677 in 2013, up from 0.668 in 2012, the number of mishandled bags on domestic flights in 2013 spiked from around 2.9 per 1,000 customers in 2012 to 3.22 in 2013, A4A stated.
A spokesperson for A4A points out, though, that "2012 was the best weather year in recent memory, a key driver for baggage delivery and on-time performance."
*Fees no deterrent**
Why would checked bags per customers be rising at a time when checked bag fees are increasing?
John Heimlich, A4A's chief economist, briefed analysts on airline economics on March 5, and said one factor is that more leisure travelers were flying in 2013, and they tend to check more bags per person than business travelers.
It was a business-travel-led recovery, Heimlich said, and leisure travelers in 2013 joined in.
Personal income is rising, unemployment is down and passengers are getting used to airlines' a la carte pricing, Heimlich said.
Heimlich said the increase in checked bags per passenger actually may be higher than A4A's numbers indicate because they don't include bags checked at the gate.
The increased rate of mishandled bags per 1,000 passengers does indeed include bags checked at the airport ticket counter and bags checked at the gate.*

"Numbers don't lie," or do they? The later postings are a beautiful example of how statistics can be parsed to give different impressions, even when there is no outright falsification. My attitude is that people should do what makes them feel best. The number of bags "mishandled" isn't huge. Every time a bag of ours didn't make it to our destination with us, it was delivered the next day.

Cognizant of that possibility, we carry toiletries, meds, a change of clothing, and electronics in wheeled totes, which easily fit in the overhead bins. We are long past the age of being able to lift up and later retrieve the 22"ers we use. We're comfortable with checking them. If you're not, by all means do carry-on only.

"we carry toiletries, meds, a change of clothing, and electronics in wheeled totes, which easily fit in the overhead bins. "

Wheeled totes, just for part of your stuff! Your wheeled tote probably weighs more than my 11 pound, non-wheeled, convertible carryon bag. If you didn't pack so heavy, everything you need would fit in a carryon bag and you wouldn't need to check (and you wouldn't need wheels).

Delayed bags are not necessarily a trivial thing. On a business trip to Europe, I checked both of my bags, fully packed because I needed suits and dress shirts for visits to customers, on a short trip to CDG. My bags were not taken off the plane, and, because I don't speak French, I couldn't explain that to the baggage handlers. Fortunately, there was a French speaking couple on the flight and they got the baggage handlers to go out and get our bags. That night and the next four I was in Paris, Strasbourg, Baden, Munich, and Marseilles for one night each, the schedule for which I knew, then Montpelier, Paris, and Waterloo, the schedule of which I didn't know in Paris (the first time). Had my bag "just" been delayed, I don't know how they ever would have caught up with me.

BTW, don't disparage statistics just because you don't understand them. The only manipulation here is SITA giving the bags mishandled as a percentage of boarding passenger. If they correctly use mishandled bags as a percentage of bags checked, they would find that percentage a lot higher and going up.