Thought this Airline Baggage update might be of interest to those of
us planning on trips this winter

Jeff Feiner


Travelers' Odds Decline on Airline Baggage

By JEFF BAILEY
Published: November 21, 2007
CHICAGO — Why do so many passengers get off the plane only to
discover that their baggage did not make the trip with them?

Sally Ryan for The New York Times
A baggage handler at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago.
American is mishandling more bags, but fewer than some rivals.

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American Airlines started asking that question with greater urgency a
year ago, and its search for answers led to, among other problems,
dirty printer heads.

Workers at American found that printers that produce adhesive tags
for bags were often dirty. That made bar codes hard to read, leading
to misdirected bags. Regular wiping of the printer heads helped, but
even with a clean printer, the bar code readers are only about 90 to
92 percent accurate, said Denise P. Wilewski, manager of airport
services for American here.

FWe never hit 100 percent — 90 percent is acceptable," she said.

Airlines are fond of saying that they have a success rate of more
than 99 percent in getting luggage to its destination along with its
owner. And every big airline has stepped up efforts to improve its
operations.

But the baggage problem is getting worse. One in every 138 checked
bags was lost during the first nine months of this year, compared
with one in 155 bags a year earlier.

The Thanksgiving holiday, with storms moving across the country from
the Northwest, is already shaping up as a difficult travel time. And
by the end of the year, close to five million travelers will have
been stuck scratching their heads at the luggage carousel.

Toby Sherman is one of them. Traveling with his wife and their 7-year-
old triplets last weekend, Mr. Sherman of Huntington Beach, Calif.,
checked five bags with American Airlines at the John Wayne Airport in
Orange County. But just four bags showed up in Chicago, where the
Shermans had come to spend Thanksgiving with family.

One son's clothes were in the missing bag, said Mr. Sherman, who was
planning a trip to the mall to buy some replacements. "Never a dull
moment," he said.

Holiday travelers can expect to feel the effects of six years of
airline downsizing in one way or another. About 27 million passengers
are expected to fly during the 12 days surrounding Thanksgiving, 4
percent more than last year, the Air Transport Association said.

But there are fewer airline employees to look after them, and their
bags. And to squeeze more flights out of the day, planes are sitting
on the ground for shorter periods between flights. So predictably,
more bags fail to join their owners, particularly on connecting
flights.

"There's a lot of opportunity for failure," said Hans Hauck, manager
of baggage operations at American's headquarters in Fort Worth. Since
Mr. Hauck started his job in September 2006, American has not met its
bag-handling goal in any month. As of late last week, though, Mr.
Hauck remained optimistic that he would make his November number. A
look at American's bag-handling operation, which is the biggest of
all United States carriers, shows it is making lots of little
improvements but still losing ground. American misplaced 7.44 bags
for every thousand passengers through Sept. 30, the Bureau of
Transportation Statistics reported, up from 6.04 for every thousand a
year earlier. (All but a tiny fraction of misplaced bags are
ultimately reunited with their owners.)

All the big carriers have done worse with baggage so far this year.
US Airways continues to struggle with bag handling at its
Philadelphia hub, three years and more than $12 million in
improvements after a Christmas 2004 meltdown. And Delta Air Lines is
trying to improve bag handling at its big Atlanta hub.

Save for a canceled flight, nothing quite disrupts a trip like a lost
bag. Mike Laitman of La Grange Park, a Chicago suburb, bought circus
tickets for relatives arriving from Missoula, Mont., last Saturday.
Then, he watched a missing bag keep them all at O'Hare so long they
missed the show.

Baggage representatives for Alaska Airlines "told us to keep
waiting," Mr. Laitman said, watching his nephew ride the baggage
carousel. "We're out $70."

Lost baggage is actually a worse problem than reflected in the big
airlines' statistics. Smaller regional airlines misplace bags at a
higher rate. But they report their statistics separately, even though
many passengers travel on these regional airlines for one leg of
their trip.

Counting together American and the regional airline it owns, American
Eagle, mishandled bags rise to 8.69 for every thousand passengers, or
a total of 639,146 through Sept. 30.

American Eagle had the worst bag-handling record of 20 airlines
tracked by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics during that
period, the agency reported.

American's baggage operation at O'Hare, the airline's second-largest
hub, after Dallas-Fort Worth, is huge, with more than seven miles of
conveyers, hundreds of workers and scores of tractors pulling baggage
carts.

Checked bags are immediately sent on a fast conveyor to be screened
by the Transportation Security Administration and then sent back to
American's big bag room. There, bar-code readers direct the bags onto
piers that handle one or more destinations. From there, bags are
placed on carts and towed out to planes for loading.

Bags with unreadable tags are left to circle the piers up to three
times before being hauled off and manually placed in the correct
stack.

About 2 percent are misread and dropped onto the wrong pier. Then, it
is up to a worker stacking the bags on carts to notice the
mistake. "He better," said Ms. Wilewski, the baggage manager.

American and other domestic airlines have resisted investing in radio
frequency identification tags, which are used by big retailers to
track inventory and are far more accurate. The tags cost about 20
cents each so it would cost $50,000 a day for American's 250,000
bags, plus the cost of hardware to read them at each step in the
process.

"We don't lose enough bags to justify that investment," said Mark
Mitchell, American's managing director of customer experience.

American's workers also stopped unloading entire planes in some
instances in the last year, instead hauling off only bags that need
to be rushed to connecting flights and then returning for the rest,
Ms. Wilewski said. Bags failing to make connections account for 60
percent of mishandled bags, American said.

In the months ahead, American also plans to install laptop computers
on tractors that pull baggage carts so that workers know of last-
minute gate changes, late arrivals and other complications. Drivers
have long used written orders and often arrive at a gate to find the
expected plane is not there.

American handles 20,000 to 35,000 checked bags a day in Chicago. Ms.
Wilewski's goal for November is 7.95 mishandled bags for every
thousand passengers. "We're not to go above that. We're under it
right now," she said.

Her Chicago operation met its monthly goal for the first time in two
years in May and then met it again in September and October.

So, last Thursday, when morning flights to London and Honolulu were
both delayed by more than eight hours because of mechanical problems,
her staff quickly rounded up bags that had already been checked,
knowing some passengers would switch flights or perhaps cancel their
trip altogether.

As some passengers were rebooked, workers tried to keep their bags
with them. Ms. Wilewski said they got nearly all the London bags on
the correct flights, but "we did miss maybe fifteen bags on Hawaii"
in the confusion.

When bags are a no-show at the carousel, American — like some other
airlines — hires contractors to deal with passengers. "It's face-to-
face and it's 90 percent problem resolution," said Paul Cody, a
manager for Prospect Airport Services, which runs baggage claim desks
for American in Chicago and Dallas-Fort Worth.

Improved computer systems allow his workers to tell travelers within
hours where their bag is and when it might arrive in a majority of
instances, Mr. Cody said. "That wasn't the case before," he said. "If
you're able to provide them with a how, where and when, it really
helps."

For people who do not retrieve the recovered bag themselves from the
airport, American uses another contractor, J & W Delivery Systems, to
deliver bags around Chicago.

"Most of them think we're the airline," said Joe Orto, a J & W
owner. "They give us grief. Most of them are still very angry."

Then again, he adds, if airlines didn't misplace bags, "I guess we'd
be out of business."