A live ranking of airlines by how much luggage they are losing

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.

> By cross referencing [social media posts] with actual lost luggage data it estimates very closely how much luggage is constantly being lost.

> Using social media as a data source has limitations but seems to be a good proxy indicator when combined with historical lost luggage data.

I'd like to understand the methodology better here. What's the "historical lost luggage data" referenced here?

I'm skeptical of how accurate scraping twitter posts is. Many (if not most) incidents don't get posted about, so I assume they must be doing some extrapolation.

Worth remembering that airlines don’t handle your luggage themselves and instead contract it out to ground handling companies.

It would be more interesting to map flight carriers/numbers to handlers (e.g. Menzies) and regions to give a more reasonable blame/availability overview.

Wow, I don't know about the data quality but this ranking pretty much exactly matches my perceived quality ranking of airlines that I have flown, even though I've been lucky enough to never lose luggage. Maybe it's not just luck since I always prefer Alaska or Southwest over United or American where possible.

Cool project, but aren't luggages handled by the airport crew?

Attribution to airlines doesn't make much sense to me. Country ranking is better but anecdotal experience tells me there are some cursed airports.

It was very unexpected to me that there are differences of 10x or more. Max/min is 187!

Super interesting and thank you for sharing!

    1.87% Air Lingus (1 in 50!  wtf)
    0.71% Spirit (well, it's spirit)
    0.45% Frontier (ditto)
    0.43% United (ditto)
    0.32% American
    0.16% Ryanair (low cost carriers can be good if they want?)
    0.19% Delta
    0.14% Southwest
    0.01% All Nipon (showing off)

Very cool. Looks like 5 of the airlines all lost the same number (461) of bags though, and 12 more airlines lost 922 bags. Data acquisition error?

This is cool, it’s also not the most accurate.

The US DOT requires airlines to submit reports on mishandled luggage.

One such is available here; https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2024-05/M... Edit: see page 39

Point to point carriers such as Allegiant and Spirit typically do much better than carriers that operate a connection like Delta and United.

Since they are souring their data from people on social media I suspect the chance that someone complains about missing a bag varies more than the amount of missing bags.

There is a regional issue that can come about. We hung out with friends a little over a week ago in Croatia and Italy. We came back via Rome -> Copenhage n -> SFO. No luggage issues on SAS.

Friends flew Split -> London -> SFO on British Airways. Apparently the day they left a large percentage of luggage that transited the BA terminal in Heathrow had issues. One bag was lost (returned to the US) for about 5 days, the other is still location unknown.

A big problem is that gate people and checkin people will suddenly claim "the flight is full" (some times it is) and try and force people to pack bags. When tasked with such, people don't always think about possible valuables in their bags and rebalance accordingly.

In the case of our friends. Their "carry on" was not much bigger than a backpack. The flight was not full. The recovered bag, thankfully, had jewelry and other items the wife of the couple didn't think about when agreeing to check the bag.

Note, the data source is social media posts.

Interesting charts to see! Interesting way to drive some airline accountability with data. I wonder if useful for regulatory bodies as metric for overall operational scorecarding, or correlations with overall airline safety/incidents.

India, UK, Canada being on top of the losers list make total sense. Their countries will also rank similarly in any other arbitrary criteria.

I'm surprised to see Swiss so up there.

Unsurprisingly point-to-point airlines lose less luggage. I'm guessing that those numbers are greatly influenced by which airports you connect through or how commonly an airline flies through problematic airports etc.

US Airlines are probably also less often going to lose luggage since it's typically (from my experience at least) impossible to check through luggage into a domestic connection.

I wonder how much this is airlines vs. airports. There was a time I needed to fly a lott for work. You got to know never to chech in luggage through Helsinki or Heathrow, as the chaces of entering the lost luggage carousel were >40%, regardless of the airline taken.

How much of luggage handling is the airline vs. the airport crew? I had assumed it was mostly the latter.

I wonder, why numbers of lost bags (last 30 days) are repeating for different airlines? For example All Nippon Airways (ANA), LATAM Brazil, Malaysia Airlines and Air Transat lost 461 bags each. This month it was even more popular to lose 922 bags.

What is with the combined 'GB' and 'IE' characters? Why do they exist and why would anyone use them, given that they break the ctrl+F functionality.

Edit: They don't show up when I copy paste them to a comment.

British Airways lost my bag but found it again when I boarded my return flight, they paid all of the nice replacement clothes I bought during the trip. So I’m fine with them losing my luggage again!

What I want to know now is: if a bag has a functioning tracker, such as by Apple or Samsung, does that help facilitate its recovery?

What a fun site and cool idea! Very interesting. A bit more depressing but I’d be a bit curious about rates of lost pets in cargo

Wanna see a plot of this against each company's stock price deviation from the airline industry benchmark.

Yuck. British Airways is right at the top. I just bring carryons only.

Airlines less traveled always have best score in the data.