It’s a horrible feeling. You arrive in Austin on American Airlines, while your checked luggage arrives in Boise (that really did happen to us, several years ago. They got the bag to us about 12 hours later). Or you arrive at Fort Lauderdale on Frontier and your 4-wheeled bag now has 3 wheels…or a rip…or a dent (that happened to me too, in the 1990s). Or you arrive in San Francisco on Southwest and your bag just…disappears. Forever (Well, eventually they’ll find it, but if they can’t figure out who it belongs to, like if your luggage tag broke off and there’s no airline sticker on the bag, it’ll eventually wind up at this place. You don’t want it to go there.).
As it turns out, there’s a group paying attention to, not only how often peoples’ bags are lost, misdirected or damaged, but also which airlines do the most and least amounts of losing, misdirecting and damaging. Of course, trying to figure out the U.S. Department of Transportations’ (USDT) info is like searching for a needle in a haystack, but luckily another group has done the hard work for us.
Luggage Hero is a worldwide day storage option for luggage. They got their start in 2017 and we wrote about them in 2018 (note: prices in that 2018 post are outdated). Anyway, they’ve been keeping track of the government’s annual Air Travel Consumer Report of complaints against U.S.-based airlines for a while now, and do some snazzy charts to show the statistics for each airline.
Anyway, their report for the first quarter of 2022 came out not that long ago and there were definitely some changes.
They collected data from the top 10 U.S.-based airlines). More than 105 million checked bags were carried on planes in the first quarter of 2022, and of those, 684,112 were reported lost or mishandled.
Here is how each airline did in terms of lost or mishandled checked luggage:
PC: Luggage Hero
Allegiant, Hawaiian, Frontier, Spirit and Southwest were the best a keeping your bags safe. American was the worst, followed by JetBlue, Delta, Alaska and United.
Here’s how they determined these numbers:
LuggageHero analyzed airlines by luggage performance based on U.S. Department of Transportation figures about Mishandled Baggage in Air Travel Consumer Reports from January to March 2022 Air Travel Consumer Report, a monthly product of the Office of Aviation Enforcement and Proceedings, Aviation Consumer Protection Division. From there, we generated pivot tables, compared airlines in regards to mishandled onboarded carries included luggage and compared months in regards to average mishandled luggage per 100 passengers. DOT baggage reports come from passenger reports of mishandled baggage, which includes lost, delayed, damaged, or pilfered luggage.
Feature Photo (cropped): Cody Bryne
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