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Jenny Lucas is thumbing through photos of her 40th birthday party in Greece, knowing that most of the clothes and jewelry she wore in the picture are gone for good.
While on a wonderful holiday, her luggage goes missing after boarding a flight to London Gatwick.
“I had such a great time, but I’m back on a low,” she says. “When I look back at some of the pictures, I think, ‘No, it was in the bag.’
Two months later and Easyjet confirmed that her luggage was permanently lost. An Esjet spokesperson told the BBC: “We are deeply saddened by the loss of Ms Lucas’ bag, and we understand the frustration this is causing.
As newspaper headlines and social media posts around the world have seen in recent months, Ms Lucas’s case is no exception, with some commentators calling it “the winter of lost luggage”.
The situation has been blamed on staff shortages, airport security personnel who have to scan all checked-in baggage, and ground handling firms hired to get all these bags and bags onto the plane and then back. to the carousels.
Many of these groups can’t resist the urge to go out on vacation again now that they’ve seen it again during the pandemic. It led to images showing hundreds of missing pieces of luggage piled up in warehouses.
And according to Spain’s Mapfre, an insurance company, the number of passengers reporting lost luggage this summer is 30% higher than in 2019, the last year of regular travel before the pandemic.
While there are no global estimates for the amount of delayed or lost baggage so far this year, 2019 data show that the problem has always been there.
That year, 19 million bags and luggage were delayed upon arrival around the world and 1.3 million were never seen again, according to an annual report by SITA, a provider of baggage management software. Add in damaged or stolen luggage and 5.6 items per 1,000 passengers are “held”.
To try to track their luggage, more and more passengers are turning to technology. In particular, they are attaching GPS trackers to their luggage, such as the Apple Air Tag.
These allow you to see exactly where your missing luggage is in the world via your smartphone or computer. Last month, Bloomberg reported that a man who traveled from California to Scotland for a wedding was able to see his luggage on its way to Toronto, Canada, and then to Detroit.
Ms Lucas said she had never used GPS tags in the past but said she would “definitely do so” from now on. “Anything to keep my luggage from getting lost again,” she says.
But while such tracking devices may give passengers peace of mind, travel industry expert Eric Leopold says they don’t solve the underlying issue — stopping backlogs that prevent bags from boarding the same flights as their owners.
“Tracking bags is useful when 99% arrive on time and 1% are mishandled, but when thousands of bags are stuck in London or elsewhere, the tags don’t help move piles of bags,” says founder Mr Leopold. Air travel consultancy firm Threedot.
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SeeTrue is primarily a company that hopes to help airports and airlines get luggage onto planes more efficiently. The Israeli company’s software can perform security scans on checked-in bags faster than human security staff.
“SeeTrue uses artificial intelligence and computer vision algorithms to find contraband in bags,” said CEO Assaf Frenkel. “It interfaces with existing X-ray and CT scanners, and perceives in real time, faster and more accurately than most human eyes, is always on and never gets tired or forgetful.
“As a result, luggage gets to the planes on time and not left behind.”
For UK technology company Airports, the solution is to eliminate the need for passengers to queue at the airport to check their luggage before their flight.
Instead, passengers can use the app and website to have their luggage delivered door-to-door.
Currently, for British Airways and Swiss International Airlines flights between London and Geneva, airport staff will collect a person’s luggage from their home. Instead of entering the departure lounge, this driver takes you to the baggage area of the departure airport in the bowels of the terminal building for check-in.
Then, at the destination airport, one of the airport’s transportation partners will pick up the luggage and deliver it to the person’s destination address.
You start paying £40 per piece of luggage, either way, unless you expect your luggage to be picked up the day before you fly. But if you want your luggage collected within an hour of the day, the price can more than double. The further you go from the airport, the higher the price.
Although the service doesn’t add any flight emissions when bags travel on the same plane as the passenger, it obviously means an extra car or van trip to the airport.
Randall Darby, the airport’s chief executive, founded the company in 2013 and is so frustrated that baggage is “traveling the way we’ve done commercial aviation for nearly a century.”
The aim is to expand the service around the world, and instead of targeting the service only at business travellers, it hopes to eventually become a “convenience” service used by all holidaymakers.
Mr Darby believes airlines and airport operators will start reducing people’s use of the airport because it is “more cost-effective than dealing with passengers checking their bags at the airport”.
However, despite such technical solutions, passengers want airlines to hire a few more customer care staff.
British expat Bill Doody, who lives in the French city of Toulouse, is one of them, after German airline Lufthansa misplaced his family of four’s luggage for a month on their way to New York via Frankfurt.
“I called Lufthansa constantly, but most of the numbers were dead,” he says. “Lufthansa turned this into a trip for the wrong reasons.
“We washed our underwear in the hotel sink,” added Mr Dodi, who traveled to Australia for work with a GPS tracker attached to each piece of luggage.
A Lufthansa spokesman said: “We cannot investigate and comment. [on] Special Lost Baggage Cases”.
Back in London, Ms Lucas is now trying to get compensation. “I lost all my things. There was irreplaceable jewelery in there. I must have lost between £1,500 and £2,000. [worth]. EasyJet is asking for receipts, but I don’t have receipts for everything.”
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