While most airline passengers’ checked luggage meets them at their destination on time, there are instances when a bag is lost, delayed or damaged.
Before you entrust an airline with your favorite clothes and toiletries for a once-in-a-lifetime vacation or those reports you need for the client meeting the next day, take a look at which airlines lost or damaged the most luggage in 2023.
The U.S. Department of Transportation released rankings for the largest domestic airline carriers and revealed exactly how many bags they mishandled. Mishandled includes lost, damaged, delayed and pilfered luggage and scooters/wheelchairs, according to USDOT. They also looked at the rate at which airlines mishandle just scooters and wheelchairs.
WHICH US AIRPORTS HAVE THE LONGEST AND SHORTEST DELAYS?
File: A passenger left, gets help from staff in locating her missing luggage in Los Angeles.
(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times / Getty Images)
American Airlines was the worst offender, losing or damaging more than eight bags for every 1,000 checked. Or, if everyone on a Boeing 737 from Los Angeles to New York checked an item, at least one would be lost or damaged. Still, the odds are less than 1% in general. This is an improvement over last year. In 2022, the airline lost or damaged more than nine bags per 1,000 checked.
The top spot goes to Allegiant Air, which only loses or damages two bags per 1,000 checked. Mega people-mover, Southwest, which checked more than 130 million bags in 2023, lost or damaged almost 588,000 of them. That is about 0.45%.
Airlines as a whole, handled scooters and wheelchairs less successfully. Spirit Airlines was the top offender, losing or damaging more than five for every 100 checked. That comes out to a 5.35% chance of having a scooter or wheelchair lost or damaged. The entire year, the airline mishandled 617 scooters and wheelchairs.
MyBaggage.com looked at longer-term mishandled baggage rates and still found that American lost or damaged the most luggage. From January 2021 through January 2024, American carried almost 201 million pieces of luggage and lost or damaged 1.75 million of them.
Over that same time, the entire industry mishandled more than 7 million bags.
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File: Baggage handlers pull a cart loaded with suitcases at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) in San Francisco, California.
(David Paul Morris/Bloomberg / Getty Images)
“Airports are some of the busiest and most complex pieces of infrastructure with thousands if not tens of thousands of people flowing through them daily,” said a spokesperson for MyBaggage.com in a statement. “The data shows that these circumstances are rare; even with the Airline that loses the most luggage (America Airlines), there is still only a 0.87% chance that they would lose your luggage based on the stats from the past three years.”