How does the airline have the legal right to sell your items, and at a possibly lower value than the contents are worth? The article says a diamond rings and expensive watches were discovered. $3k in compensation likely seems insufficient.
E.g. in Canada: Air Passenger Protection complaints: https://rppa-appr.ca/file-air-travel-complaint
In Quebec, lawyers aren’t even allowed in small claims courts.
I'd wager most of those items are pre-TSA anyway as they have a pattern of stealing things. Years ago I visited the Microsoft employee store in Redmond where you could buy Xbox games for super cheap. They actually had a sign at the register warning people not to put them in checked bags because they disappeared.
How do you know it's TSA and not the airline's baggage handlers? The latter actually handle your bags a lot more than the former (and do so in places which are not monitored with security cameras).
TSA gets the advantage of seeing inside of the bags on a screen to know which ones to “pull for more inspection”.
Right now they have no incentive to improve themselves or prevent theft by underpaid, overworked baggage handlers.
Every suitcase is labeled with a name and a flight. They know exactly who the baggage belongs to, they just can't be bothered to call people who forgot a suitcase or send people their luggage back. I don't see why we should accept anything other than either return of the baggage or full compensation.
And no, not every suitcase is labeled, that's the entire point. Luggage gets lost when those tags get torn off, chewed up, etc. Luggage is handled by both humans and conveyor belts, and all sorts of things can go wrong.
And how would you define "full compensation"? If your luggage is lost, you could just lie and say it was carrying a million dollars in cash. How is anybody going to prove what full compensation is?
Or, if you were required to declare the value of your luggage when checking in, and you said it was a million dollars, the airline would just say nope, not gonna take it. Too risky for us if we lose it, which we can't guarantee because we employ fallible human beings.
Smart people work on this. The current solution really is a pretty good one, for what's practically achievable given the price you pay for your ticket.
Most companies are not interested in guaranteeing the transportation of extreme valuables because it's not a service they can profitably provide at a level people are willing to pay for.
I do think some people dismiss systems that work well enough and which just aren't worth getting another tenth of a percent out of. Airline baggage tracking has actually gotten a lot better over the past few decades. The only time I've had luggage significantly delayed in decades was the result of a canceled international connection which involved being transferred to a different airline. That cost me a fair bit of money and was almost much worse than it was but it was one time.
>Every suitcase is labeled with a name and a flight. They know exactly who the baggage belongs to, they just can't be bothered to call people who forgot a suitcase or send people their luggage back.
They do have an incentive: The $3k compensation. The fact that that's not enough, shows that it's a bit more complex then calling people.
>I don't see why we should accept anything other than either return of the baggage or full compensation.
Because otherwise accepting luggage would be to risky for airlines, or, as another commenter suggested, they'd have to make people buy insurance.
For whatever it's worth, I once lost my drivers license on an airplane and it was returned to me in the mail a few months later. Of course, returning a drivers license cost them a lot less (nothing) than returning luggage would have. I'm not sure they had an incentive to return it though, beyond basic courtesy.
(Evidently if you drop a drivers license in the mail without postage or an envelope, the USPS will send it on to whatever address is listed on it.)
In fact if you want to do one better charge a small conveyance fee for the cost of handling it say $10 and the incentives will be ever better aligned with doing a reasonable job.