Lost bags, (or “mishandled” bags as they are called in the industry) are expensive. Before Covid, IATA estimated they cost the airline industry $2.1bn a year. File picture: Colin Keegan, Collins Dublin

Air travel comes with added anxiety these days. No surprise then, that one of the oldest and most enduring travails of the traveller has just got worse: the wait at the end of the journey to see if your bag will clatter down the carousel and join you at your destination.

On a normal day in Dublin, over the past 10 years, up to 50 bags might be expected to fail to meet their owners at arrivals. Nowadays, the missing list reaches 500 a day and sometimes more, over 1,000 on several days in recent weeks.

The problem is largely human, a wake-up call for an industry increasingly dependent on tech. Europe’s and north America’s airports say they are short of burly men to lift and load these bags. Aircraft captains are opting to take off without all of the luggage to avoid missing their slot.

Tech failures, as at Heathrow T2 a few weeks ago, and strikes, as at Zurich a few days ago, exacerbate the problem.

Baggage handling in Dublin Airport is a game of four parts. Ryanair and Aer Lingus handle their own baggage in Dublin for 80% of the passengers who fly with them (although not in other airports). Swissport and Sky handling handle the 70-odd other airlines who use the airport.

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The two subcontracted agencies say they have had problems staffing up after Covid, and Aer Lingus have said they have been hit by Covid absences.

But that affects only the tail of the problem. Most bags go astray at the transfer airports, en route to or from Dublin. Dublin’s nearest and best-fed hub is Heathrow. Paris, Amsterdam and Frankfurt are the big ones to the east, JFK, Chicago, Toronto, Newark and Atlanta the big ones to the west.

While all hubs have their problems, the situations at Toronto and Heathrow are dire. Westjet have landed aircraft in Dublin with none of the passenger bags. A Canadian blogger who aired his grievances on RTÉ this week had flown home to Oregon using Westjet and a transfer through Toronto, something he neglected to mention. Even BCC, Before Covid Chaos, Westjet had a policy of offloading bags for weight reasons.

Dublin has become a Dub-hub of its own in recent years, but a lot of passengers self-transfer, using Ryanair to fly, collect their bag and check it in on an Aer Lingus flight west. Few bags are lost by self-transferring passengers.

Ryanair does not use hubs and therefore, does not lose bags. Passengers load and collect their bags on their flights, which are always point-to-point. Bags only get lost if there is a baggage loaders strike or other handling issue at one of the airports.

Aer Lingus, on the other hand, is the biggest carrier of passengers from Heathrow and is left with the bulk of Dublin’s baggage problem and the butt of bag gags by online comedians. They have moved to transfer their baggage mountain landside to assist couriers delivering bags to disgruntled passengers.

They appeal to people not to ring the customer care line, who cannot give them the answers they need, and fill out the details correctly online. Filing out lost baggage reports by phone is time-consuming and clogs up the lines when the airline communications are under siege for a variety of other issues.

Aer Lingus complains some of the passengers who lost bags have moved on when the bags are delivered, without telling the airline, leaving the courier companies in a game of where’s Wally throughout the country.

Airlines always lost bags. Worldwide, before Covid, six out of every 1,000 passengers could expect to be separated from their luggage for longer than they expected, or in the case of 1%, forever.

Compensation, defined by the Montreal convention, is extremely low. In contrast with the elaborate compensation code of passenger rights under Eu261m, the maximum you can claim for a lost bag is about €1,200.

Bags whose barcode has not become detached will eventually be found. In the same way that courier companies track parcels or with lenders returning a library book, airlines trace checked luggage as it moves through an airport and between aircraft, which is where half of the losses occur.

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Two years before Covid, International Air Transport Association’s Resolution 753 came into effect. It introduced mandatory tracking at four stages of a checked bag’s journey: when it is first handed in to the airline, when it is loaded onto the aircraft, when it is delivered to the transfer area and when it is returned to the passenger. The barcode will tell when the bag was last loaded.

Irish engineers have designed many of the baggage tracking solutions in use by airlines worldwide. Some airlines, such as Qatar, have an app which allows passengers to track the bag themselves.

These make sense because lost bags, (or “mishandled” bags as they are called in the industry) are expensive. Before Covid, IATA estimated they cost the airline industry $2.1bn a year.

This is not to mention the untold stress and inconvenience to passengers and the damage to the brand even. As is the case with Aer Lingus, the airline is not ultimately responsible.

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