Baggage Blues

4th Aug 2010

You have arrived in Phuket for your holiday of a lifetime and are waiting to collect your bags off the carousel at the airport... and you wait... and wait... and wait.

Holiday not off to a good start. Every traveller's nightmare.

You have just experienced the second most serious incident that make your trip unpleasant'baggage mishandling.

The good news is that the great majority of the 32.8 million mishandled bags in the airline industry in 2008 were reunited with their owners in less than 48 hours and only a small fraction, 0.32 bags per thousand passengers, or 736,000 bags, failed to show up.

These figures from SITA, the world's leading specialist in air transport communication and IT solutions, actually show that the number of mishandled bags [ checked baggage that has been delayed, damaged or pilfered ] fell by over a fifth last year from 42.4 million to 32.8 million.

The number of bags lost or stolen also dropped from 1.28 million to 736,000.

But that is not much compensation if your favourite swimsuit is in the mishandled bag and you are dying for that first swim in the hotel pool or along Kalim Beach, but it is heading in the right direction.

You may well ask why your bag did not arrive with you. Here are the main reasons: failed to load, 16 percent; ticketing error/bag switch/security/other, 13 percent; arrival station mishandling, 8 percent; airport/customs/weather/space-weight restriction, 6 percent; loading/offloading error, 5 percent and tagging error, 3 percent.

The single biggest problem is when bags are transferred from one aircraft to another, although this has fallen steadily from 61 percent in 2005 to 49 percent in 2008.

Airlines are taking a variety of measures to further improve baggage handling. These include the International Air Transport Association [IATA] which represents 230 airlines, or 93 percent of all scheduled airlines, implementing a baggage improvement programme to more than 180 airlines, which is already having dramatic results; door-to-door baggage handling and off-airport check-in is growing amongst airlines.

IATA estimates that mishandled baggage costs airlines USD3.8 billion a year affecting 42 million passengers.

So while is very, very annoying, and quite scary, when your baggage turns up, you can be [slightly] compensated that you are one of 42 million but that the overall problem is improving.

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