Unclaimed Baggage Center: The Shop for Lost Luggage (2015)

I once left a Kindle in the the seat pocket and noticed promptly after deboarding, just late enough to not be able to go back. Went to the retrieval company (it was not the lost&found office, at MUC there's a small office by one company that seems to exclusively handle this sort of stuff) and they phoned someone. The result was that the cleaning crew had just been in there and nothing was reported found. :/

The Texas state government has a store in Austin (there may be others in other cities) where you can wander in and buy used office equipment and such (I got a sweet filing cabinet) and lots and lots of pocket knives. Including, occasionally, collectible ones worth some amount of money.

That's where they go when they're confiscated at the airport.

There's always some risk, though the level is definitely reducing as airport systems get better at handling the edge cases.

But even taking into account the improvements there, there's still a bunch of sleep deprived humans at the end of your 12 hour redeye who are happy to take your bag if it looks a bit like theirs (this happened to me even though I covered my bag in unique stuff...)

I've had bags get misrouted and delayed, but I wouldn't consider that "lost". Are you saying you've never had an instance when you didn't have your bag in baggage claim right when you landed?

One time my bag was delayed by a day and an airline representative delivered it to my home, which was nice. Another time I volunteered to be bumped in exchange for a voucher but my bag was already loaded so it arrived significantly before I did.

TFA says airlines are mostly really good at getting bags to their owner - only .01% of bags become unclaimed.

It's been an embarrassingly long time since my undergraduate statistics class, so the math might not be 100% correct, but I'd like to attempt it anyway, be sure to tell me if I'm wrong:

Worst case, you fly twice a month for 20 years, that's 480 flights. Each flight is a round trip, so baggage is entered into the airlines systems 960 times in 20 years.

If the probability that an airline gets your baggage to you each time is 99.99%

.9999^960 = .9085

1-.9085 = .0915

So, if my calculations are correct, in 20 years time, there's a 9.15% of chance your bags having be lost at least once. Assuming that the odds of an airline losing all bags are the same - and they are obviously not.

I am on a plane once a week and refuse to check anything. I pack light and take it with me on board. Yesterday for the first time in like 3 years I checked a bag and it never made it. They changed gates on me 3 times in a span of 6 hours due to a storm that passed through DFW. It's not lost but it never made one of the gate changes. Lucky it just had some booze ( one of the reasons I had to check it, TSA Rules) in it and a few items that were not that important for my trip.

Rule 1 - Pack light and just bring a carry on if possible.

Rule 2 - If you are connecting try not to check any bags.

Rule 3 - If checking a bag make sure you tag it with your flight number, home address, destination address, phone number, and record locator number (this one is important).

I can't wait for the day of fully autonomous cars. Anything within 8-10 hours driving would replace flying for me. My trip was a 2.5 hour flight and took 12 hours to get there before it was all over.

Not on a plane, but I've forgotten a bag on a train once. Lost a bunch of dirty clothes I was bringing home to wash at my parents place. The train companies answer was "call lost and found at the 3 major train stations along the line [one of which is in another country] as well as the police in the 3 cities". Never got the bag back.

> Am I just lucky?

The only one “lost” permanently (had many lost temporarily) was put on an earlier flight than mine. Fairly likely wasn’t lost by airline / airport, but rather stolen. Conveniently the cameras near that carousel weren’t working that day.

I make about 6 trips a year, and last year my bag was completely lost after a tight connection at Paris.

The value of the luggage was much more than I would have expected - clothes add up in cost - but the work travel insurance covered everything. It was a hassle re-buying all the stuff I don't use very often, after I'd put that task off for over a month hoping the bag would turn up somewhere.

More likely you don't travel with enough valuables which is smart or aren't wealthy enough.

Are you expecting them to boot from a flash drive and snoop through files? That just doesn't seem a realistic expectation, nor even one I would want them to be doing.

Having layers (first the airlines and then Unclaimed Baggage) makes it not just twice as unlikely but thousands of times less likely that belongings will be stolen in the way you describe.

Managers of a family-owned business in operation for nearly fifty years have to have low time-preference and future orientation enough to realize that scamming an expensive item would be foolish when they have an entire warehouse of legitimately acquired merchandise. Moreover, the goodwill from a story about reuniting a sentimental memento or a hard-to-replace valuable (“That laptop had the only copy of my dissertation!”) is most certainly in their business interest.

Equipment there occasionally have phone numbers and other identifying marks in non-obvious spots. Multimeters have traceable calibration certificates and flash drives and laptops are wiped by hand by something called "Operations", a separate part of the business. They are incapable of handling SAS drives, and they are sold unwiped. Don't worry about that.

North Alabama represent!