Everyday, thousands of travellers come to a town in Alabama to sift through lost bags filled with everything from wedding dresses to medieval suits of armour.
Do you have anything to back that up other than “my bag got lost once”?
I was trying to focus on the fact that sometimes you just can’t find the passenger for a bag, but if we agree to that I’m happy to offer my perspective there as well… If you care.
Sigh. Yes, but I’m not going to write up a peer reviewed thesis with annotations for an online discussion about how airlines are garbage at handling luggage.
Basically if your luggage doesn’t have identification in it and you don’t submit a claim (or the airline screws that part of the process up too, which has happened to me as well) they will not do anything at all for 5 days, then they will put your bag in storage for 2 months waiting to see if you come looking for it, AND if they can find it after that you’ll get it back. According to the US DOT, airlines generally don’t even declare your bag LOST until 5-14 days after your trip. If your trip was domestic it’s almost certainly long over by the time they decide your bag isn’t delayed and it’s actually lost. The onus is now on you to continue to devote time and energy to reclaiming your belongings, while they basically wash their hands of it if they can’t easily match the bag with a phone number.
None of this changes the fact that almost all unclaimed bags are the fault of the airline for not getting the bag to the destination at the same time as the person who owned it. That they are so easily able to dispose of these things (and sometimes even profit from it) after they caused the problem in the first place is pretty gross, to me. But when you have traveled by air as much as I have, you see a lot of gross shit that they pull.
Yes, but I’m not going to write up a peer reviewed thesis with annotations for an online discussion about how airlines are garbage at handling luggage.
That’s fair. So, I am a former airline employee. Before you start throwing tomatoes at me and get upset about me being a bootlicker or whatever, I’ve been out of the industry for almost a decade and am not particularly attached to it. Honestly, your description of how it works sounds about right, admittedly I never had to get super involved in baggage issues because I worked at a tiny station and lost bags were so rare that I don’t think I ever encountered one (delayed bags, sure)
With that said, nobody wants a bag issue. It’s a headache for everyone involved and the computer systems to handle it sucks (at least, they did when I worked at an airport, which was a few years before I left the industry entirely). And it’s pretty much always going to be cheaper and easier to get your bag back to you than steak with a claim. But yes, it’s hard for it not to be the airline’s fault when all you’re really responsible for is handing it off (but a name tag would be nice).
But also… Everything has its limits. As I already said, there’s a point where a bag and its owner just aren’t going to be reunited. It sucks, it’s rare, but it’s inevitable when the major airlines check at least tens of millions of bags per year (ballparking from the fact that the big airlines do a little over a million flights each). While it happens enough that is caused this shop to open, it’s not exactly a nationwide chain. It’s some random one-off place in Alabama. I get the grossness factor, but the only other real option is eventually going into a landfill. You can’t expect it to be held literally forever.
And as for liability amounts, every method of shipping has risks. Airlines aren’t the only ones to encounter this. IIRC, insurance began from the shipping industry centuries ago. And limits here make sense too. If I threw a few vmulti-million dollar diamonds in my checked luggage (or if I say I did) should there be endless potential liability for the $50 checked bag on a $100 discount ticket? No carrier (including mail or package delivery companies) will do that without some kind of additional insurance.
Do you have anything to back that up other than “my bag got lost once”?
I was trying to focus on the fact that sometimes you just can’t find the passenger for a bag, but if we agree to that I’m happy to offer my perspective there as well… If you care.
Sigh. Yes, but I’m not going to write up a peer reviewed thesis with annotations for an online discussion about how airlines are garbage at handling luggage.
Basically if your luggage doesn’t have identification in it and you don’t submit a claim (or the airline screws that part of the process up too, which has happened to me as well) they will not do anything at all for 5 days, then they will put your bag in storage for 2 months waiting to see if you come looking for it, AND if they can find it after that you’ll get it back. According to the US DOT, airlines generally don’t even declare your bag LOST until 5-14 days after your trip. If your trip was domestic it’s almost certainly long over by the time they decide your bag isn’t delayed and it’s actually lost. The onus is now on you to continue to devote time and energy to reclaiming your belongings, while they basically wash their hands of it if they can’t easily match the bag with a phone number.
None of this changes the fact that almost all unclaimed bags are the fault of the airline for not getting the bag to the destination at the same time as the person who owned it. That they are so easily able to dispose of these things (and sometimes even profit from it) after they caused the problem in the first place is pretty gross, to me. But when you have traveled by air as much as I have, you see a lot of gross shit that they pull.
That’s fair. So, I am a former airline employee. Before you start throwing tomatoes at me and get upset about me being a bootlicker or whatever, I’ve been out of the industry for almost a decade and am not particularly attached to it. Honestly, your description of how it works sounds about right, admittedly I never had to get super involved in baggage issues because I worked at a tiny station and lost bags were so rare that I don’t think I ever encountered one (delayed bags, sure)
With that said, nobody wants a bag issue. It’s a headache for everyone involved and the computer systems to handle it sucks (at least, they did when I worked at an airport, which was a few years before I left the industry entirely). And it’s pretty much always going to be cheaper and easier to get your bag back to you than steak with a claim. But yes, it’s hard for it not to be the airline’s fault when all you’re really responsible for is handing it off (but a name tag would be nice).
But also… Everything has its limits. As I already said, there’s a point where a bag and its owner just aren’t going to be reunited. It sucks, it’s rare, but it’s inevitable when the major airlines check at least tens of millions of bags per year (ballparking from the fact that the big airlines do a little over a million flights each). While it happens enough that is caused this shop to open, it’s not exactly a nationwide chain. It’s some random one-off place in Alabama. I get the grossness factor, but the only other real option is eventually going into a landfill. You can’t expect it to be held literally forever.
And as for liability amounts, every method of shipping has risks. Airlines aren’t the only ones to encounter this. IIRC, insurance began from the shipping industry centuries ago. And limits here make sense too. If I threw a few vmulti-million dollar diamonds in my checked luggage (or if I say I did) should there be endless potential liability for the $50 checked bag on a $100 discount ticket? No carrier (including mail or package delivery companies) will do that without some kind of additional insurance.