Passenger Uses AirTags, Discovers Airline Donated Their Bags to Charity
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In Europe, you show up into a train station, handle your bikes or precious bag yourself, get in your train, and step out to leave the station immediately.
To anyone in the airline industry : the bad user experience with bags doesn't encourage me to carry bags in the cabin. It makes me get buses or trains whenever I have stuff with me.
This should be a reminder that _users_ know best, not management. They have _needs_ not because they're picky, and won't adapt to your service. They will get an service to match their needs.
I feel like airlines don't want you to check in bags because they say it's premium, and _good_ passengers don't need them. Well, if your feature is 'premium', you don't develop it it to offer a satisfying user experience.
Bags should be on the MVP. You want bags and to get them bag, not just money. Or users move on to others company products.
The _lowest_ internationally accepted limit for high speed rail is 125mph.
Even if Beightline ever actually upgrades to 110mph that still won’t be real HSR.
They also have a real problem with Florida drivers being Florida drivers. True high speed rail is fully grade separated (no road crossings)
That said, this is their plan for the expansion to Orlando:
> Brightline will terminate at this station once the 170-mile (270 km) Orlando Extension track is built. Trains will run up to 125 mph (201 km/h) with a travel time of approximately three hours from Orlando's airport to Miami.
So even though there already is a sort of high speed rail between DC and Philly, I, as resident in the suburbs, would probably just drive unless work was paying for ubers on both ends. Even if Acela was a true HSP rail, that wouldn't really change my calculus.
So while there is a goldilocks zone where cars take too long and its too short for airplanes to be faster, it's probably not very viable.
If my circumstances were different, and that time was mostly recoverable as leisure then it's absolutely great advice, but it doesn't scale to every person.
You'd be much better off spending that money on local commuter rail, which is more or less a prerequisite for HSP to work anyway.
I live in a city with decent buses, 3 street train lines and a commuter rail, and use the street lines frequently. Unless your departure and destination are right on the train line, you're still looking at a 1 hour - 2 hour commute with possible missed connections every step of the way. To canvas the city thoroughly you would need buses or trains running every 10 minutes, on every 3rd or 5th block. They would also need to be preferable to the alternative (a personal vehicle with no disruptive passengers, controlled climate, that is available when and where you need it).
Do I love taking the train into the city center for a night on the town, or out to the airport to avoid parking? Absolutely. Will I sacrifice 3 hours out of my day just so that I can say I'm saving the planet? Probably not.
The only way it would work would be some giant weave pattern of train lines where 1 car continues on, one departs left, and one departs right every stop. The budget and logistics of that would make it prohibitively expensive and prone to failure. There are also loads of reasons why people can't take transit (kids, cargo, late night / early morning schedules) and if they're not 80% solved, it will never catch on in the states.
Such a disconnect.
If it was a 5 minute drive, in city, you could just walk there in 10.
Parent effectively said "not close". So you suggest a 1 hour drive, a 2 hour train, instead of a 90 minute drive?
(You also have to wait for the train to leave, wait for its stops along the way, and be there precisely on time (hence the wait at the start)).
I find so many of the comments boil down to "I live deep in a city, never drive, and am in an entirely different geopolitical environment, but I know what makes sense for you!
Having a system that takes people only from where they live to where they work is much more inconvenient when individual cars allow people to go from work to the kids’ sports game to Costco to a relatives house and then home.
But that model of public transit is not tenable outside of places with density like Manhattan. Even in New York City, all the public transit is mostly focused on getting people into and out of Manhattan, so people in outer boroughs like to have cars.
This is what a public transit map that would compete with the convenience of individual cars would look like:
https://www.tokyometro.jp/en/subwaymap/
Contrast with the best that the USA can do:
Not that Tokyo is perfect, but it still has a far greater radius that link with each other without going to the central district.
And my house is too expensive because I'm only 5 minute from the subway. The vast majority of people have to live further.
If I was going to downtown Philly, might be worth it. But if I wasn't, then driving would absolutely be a lot fast. Since I'd have to navigate the last miles there adding more time.
The ability to just leave whenever I want without having to connect a bunch of train rides is pretty valuable even if it took longer.
EDIT: and to make it clear, I'm not a suburanite who is allergic to public transport. Until a year ago, I lived in the city and didn't have a personal car. And even now, I'd take Acela to NYC rather than fly or drive. It just doesn't make sense for other stops on the way like Philly, Wilmington, Baltimore. And Boston would take too long on Acela, and I'd fly instead.
But... doing so requires driving an hour in basically the wrong direction to the suburban Amtrak station. And then it takes longer than driving directly would. The only reason I do it is that I hate driving into Manhattan and parking there. Whereas when I arrive by train I can just walk to my hotel.
And, yeah, for Boston to DC I'll typically fly. The train is viable and I've done it but it's a full day trip vs. a short flight. And one of the airports is right on the metro vs. the NYC airports which are not.
As of November 2022, the DC silver metro line now includes Dulles International (IAD). So both of the major airports are now directly connected.
https://www.wmata.com/rider-guide/silver-line-extension/Wash...
This is enabled by the fact that train stations have much more limited footprints, and that multiple train stations in a city do not get in each other’s way.
Heck in China many of the "small" cities on HSR lines are larger then Portland OR.
I definitely think that the markets would be far better doing along the coasts rather than connecting them, but I don't think there is zero market either.
If the train is an overnight with a bed, and goes midtown to midtown, I’d take it every time.
For as slow as such a train ride would be, it still seems implausibly fast. For example, flying from Seattle to Miami today takes less than 6 hours. If you laid a perfectly straight rail line all the way from Seattle to Miami, and ran a TGV along it at its top speed with no stops, it'd take more than 13 hours. And once you make the train case even slightly more realistic instead of using all of those best-case assumptions that are impossible in practice, you easily exceed 15 hours too.
As far as the ancillary logistics, less secondary infrastructure is needed meaning you don't have to go to a designated chunk of land the size of a midsized town that literally cannot be conveniently located, and you avoid the hassle associated with onboarding (read: the TSA). Luggage also doesn't seem to be nearly as much of a hassle for whatever reason. I'm not sure if this would carry over to true high-volume long distance trains, but at the very least the baggage problem is conceptually simpler than at an airport.
There are definitely downsides for the passenger, mostly the added time in transit, but in my experience this only matters is when you require quick turnaround and spontaneity in your travel — in which case you'd just take a plane. For a trip that is planned in advance, even a cross-country train trip can make sense, especially if you work on your computer/phone.
The main downside is that long-distance train travel requires a sleeper car and a roomette to be really viable in the general case, and this is hard to scale. This may be an unsolvable problem since it's just so much less space-efficient than row seats, but if it isn't I see no reason why long distance rail couldn't carve out a significant chunk of the cross-country market.
Is every track maintained every night? No. But:
* it is incredibly dangerous for a high speed train to collide with anything low speed (track maintenance vehicles, supplies, or workers). The rights of way are so constrained that there is no safe way to have them maintain only one track out of two, so they insist on total separation as a policy: https://international-railway-safety-council.com/wp-content/...
* the Shinkansen are a two track network without parallel lines of the same gauge, so any maintenance reroute would require changing to either a normal train or to a bus, making sleepers impossible to operate normally. Even if you could though, trains need regular schedules for both riders and employees, and using different reroutes every night would be a scheduling nightmare
Bullet trains (which we don't even have in the US) are around 100-200mph at best.
That's still a huge difference unfortunately, especially going 2500+ miles across the entire country.
Meanwhile, the fastest train in India averages under 60 mph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatimaan_Express
Train stations are often conveniently located in crowded downtowns. Airports are located some distance away.
Security is a lot more of a problem on planes because hijacking planes is a problem. Hijacking trains is pointless.
Yes the seats are obviously more comfy than plane (although one should compare with business class because it costs similar), but turbulence is not fair comparison.
The only real credible threat is mass violence against the passengers. That could just as easily occur in any crowed public space.
Not coincidentally, these are historically the most commonly used methods.
Boarding a passenger car from which it is hard to get to the engine where the engineer is driving the train is far less likely to be effective.
And security is not just about hijackings. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_...
No matter how many want to avoided crowded places, they are crowded because a lot of people are already there, and a lot of others would like to grow. And this is only possible if there actually are good ways to get there.
To serve a geographically spread out group, it is reasonable to build a a hub and spoke system. And the geographically convenient place to put the hub generally already has a city built there exactly because it is geographically convenient.
If I--and almost certainly many other people who don't live in the city--had to drive into and park in downtown Boston to take Amtrak it wouldn't remotely be a consideration. And, yes, there's commuter rail but now you're adding hours to traveling.
At that point I'm just driving into NY or maybe driving to a NY commuter rail station.
Okay, let's look at that bullet train. At best that's 200 mph. A trip from SF to NY is then going to be 12.85 hrs. Assuming we go in a perfectly straight line (trains can't do this) and no stops. We'll say 13 for ease. A nonstop flight (not hard to find) is about 5.5 hrs.
In both situations we're only considering the travel time of the vehicle and not including anything like layovers/stops or boarding and unboarding. These are not one or two hour differences in travel time and thus security would make the difference, there are over 7hrs difference! You could fly all the way back to SFO before that bullet train rider gets to NYC (you're already through security). (We're also assuming that as trains get more popular that similar security theater isn't also introduced)
Now I do think people would still take the train fwiw because even with a 7hr travel time takes up all your day and flying sucks. Plenty of people will make this trade as long as trains don't sardine pack like airlines do. But let's also not fool ourselves into thinking the times are roughly the same and that that train also isn't going to take closer to 16hrs to go across country. Which even means doubling the speed (400mph) still makes it slower than a plane with security check-ins.
Surely a US train could aim to be up there with the fastest?
Even with that boost though, your point remains.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/travel/article/worlds-fastest-trains...
Transcontinental bullet trains across North America are a total pipe dream just based on simple geography. But bullet trains should play a role in our regional transportation infrastructure.
Also note that while the Shanghai Maglev does have a maximum speed of 268mph it has an average speed of 139/155mph (different schedules = different speeds). We need to consider average when calculating travel times. You'll also note that on that CNN page that several of those trains have test runs that reach near 400mph! This is good for considering where we might be able to get with high levels of optimization but they do not reflect the reality of speeds that a passenger will actually experience. Considering the extrapolations we'd realistically need trains that could have max speeds above 600mph and sustained speeds (through quite windy areas and mountains mind you) of 400+mph.
I do think cross continental passenger trains can still have a market but I think more coastal focused lines will have substantially better markets and we shouldn't expect trans-continental train alternatives to planes being popular for quite some time. The coastal lines mostly make sense because the total times are still relatively short and we consider the convenience tradeoff more influential. I'm pretty sure that this trade-off is highly non-linear with respect to travel time (convenience weakly dominates in short transit but time strongly dominates on long hauls).
I looked it up out of curiosity. To travel the length of Japan's bullet train network, which goes most of the length of the country, it takes 3 trains and 31 stops, for a total of just under 12 hours. A flight between the same locations is just over 3 and a half hours.
For those who want to look it up, these figures are for Kagoshima-Chuo Station to Shin-Hakodate Hokuto Station.
I can see how the train would be come out ahead for shorter distances, but I think this kind of trip is more reasonable of a comparison with the distance of flights that many Americans are taking.
Extrapolating from there your train would take 36hours.
How do you figure that? I'm thinking out loud here: If we use some real examples: I'm lucky in that most of my family lives near major travel hubs, so I can fly direct most of the time. However, they all live in various places along the east coast of the US whereas I'm on the west coast. My trip last summer to see one group of them represented a 3100 mile / 5000 kilometer journey.
The flight was 5 hours and 30 minutes. Let's add 2 hours of airport shenanigans to cover showing up ahead of boarding, handling bags, picking up luggage on the far side, etc. So 7 hours 30 minutes of travel (not counting commute to or from airport, but you'd have to get to your high speed rail station as well)
(as an addendum, I was able to take public transit on both sides - busses & BART on the bay area side, and a local commuter rail on the far side. I had to get picked up by car from the train station though, no busses in that town)
The fastest Japanese and European high speed trains go 300 km/hr. That's 16 and a half hours of rolling at top speed - no stops, slowdowns, sharing slower track, etc. If you stop at major cities along the way (say one stop per US state), you're probably looking at 20 hours of time on the train - each stop meaning you have to stop for 5-10 minutes, slow down and speed up, generally not be able to hit top speed in the confines of the city, etc.
The transit time would be nearly triple in the best case scenario for a coast to coast flight in the US.
The only thing I can think that would mitigate this is, as you said, sleeper cars. West coast to east coast is generally considered a lost day between the travel time and the timezone shift. I guess if you start your train journey in the early morning and sleep on the train that evening, arriving in the early morning next day, it could make up for the "get to the family's place and immediately go to sleep" pattern. You're just sleeping enroute rather than at your destination.
For "mid range" journeys, take a bullet train trip I did in Japan: Sendai -> Hiroshima. I spent 6 hours on the train, the flight would've been about and hour and a half plus the extra 2 hours of airport fun. Because it was a vacation I wasn't going to meaningfully fill the "saved" 2 to 3 hours and the train was way more comfortable. But, for business travel, this wouldn't have been good. In the US it's not an uncommon pattern to take a flight to the next major city for same-day business to avoid hotel costs.
For flights so short the airport time exceeds or matches the train difference, obviously this doesn't matter (e.g. SF <-> LA travel if California high speed rail manages to survive until completion).
But you may be sent from SF to Chicago and be expected to attend meetings upon arrival. Can't do that with high speed rail. Even if they went 50% faster, it'll take 7-8 hours to reach Chicago from California.
For the record, I love high speed trains. I've enjoyed using them in the countries that have them. But the longest journey I've ever taken on one is that Sendai to Hiroshima trip, and the second longest is Munich to Berlin (I originated in Innsbruck, Austria but the leg to Munich was not on a high speed train).
It'd be great if we could replace "intra-state" or "neighboring-state" flights with trains, places where they really are faster or at comparable travel times. Obviously none of this is looking at the fact that all of these high speed trains are electric, so they could be powered from zero-carbon or carbon-neutral sources, whereas air travel is a significant source of emissions. But that's a separate argument.
Japan is the size of California.
> You factor that into your plan and travel comfortably and peacefully.
If train travel became as popular as air travel in the US, the TSA would pay just as much attention to making it as miserable as air travel.
So I took train since land borders were much more permissive. Instead of 1.5h flight + a bit of time extra around, it took me full 2 days with extra sleep in Barcelona of fastest bullet trains Europe has (TGV + Spanish equivalent, 300kmh was frequent speed) to get home.
That's not even through-Europe crossing, rather a relatively small hop within south-western part of Europe. It was more expensive as flights too (but not that much, but then there was hotel). Any destination we went through for holidays in past few years are completely unreachable by trains, and the amount of hops (stress, delays, missed connections) is massive. Train networks have much more massive cascade issues with delays propagating like tsunami far and wide. Trains simply don't cover much apart from few very narrow cases in best possible situation globally. Everywhere else, train networks are much worse.
If we could train more of those the airlines might be able to run their continental flights more successfully.
1. Show up to the train station with your bike.
2. In most places, get turned away because you were supposed to pay extra to reserve a bike spot in advance and now they're out of space because there are only like 4 spots in the whole train.
3. Assuming you planned ahead, remove your front wheel so you can hang the bike in a designated luggage rack, there is nowhere else you're allowed to put it. The train cars have not meaningfully changed in 100 years and are not tall enough to fit a bike with the front wheel attached. Seriously, go to the Smithsonian African American History Museum and look at their train car from the 40s, the interior is almost the same as a modern car.
4. Cringe as the train car sways and your bike's front fork repeatedly slams into the wall.
5. At your stop, the conductor starts letting people on before you've unhooked your bike so now you need to fight your way down the aisle against the current of people while holding your partially disassembled bike and bag so you can get off before the doors close.
That said I take Amtrak over a plane every chance I get, I will pay more for it, and I really really wish we had more trains here. I have taken a 48 hour train from Boston to Denver before instead of flying and I'd do it again, even if I can't convince anyone else to do it with me.
- show up with 5 people and bikes 30 minutes before the train leaves with no reservation. They see that we have more bikes than the standard 4 on the train and hook up a special bike storage car with ~50 bike racks that require nothing more than hanging your bike on it.
- get on train.
- get off at destination and go to bike car where they give you your bikes and off you ride.
Not to say thats every time I’ve ridden a train with a bike but its happened more than once.
Mind blowing considering how bicycle friendly it proclaims itself to be.
Everything happens on my own schedule without having to deal with people when I drive.
Traffic is like riding the train but everyone's got a gun pointed at each other
The sad reality is that air travel has much lower cost for fixed infrastructure (≈ airports) compared to trains, per passenger km. If we build an airport, an airline can more or less just fly wherever from that airport. If someone wants to fly 2 hours west to a large city, and others would like to fly 2 hours south, they can just do that without really impacting the other (except for taking up slot times).
With trains every single km of track you lay can only be used going in that direction (duh), and needs to be maintained year around. You have expensive tunnels, bridges and "advanced" control systems and infra all along the track. To extend the rail network to another city is an enormous up-front const, and only "unlocks" one new city (or direction). A (large) airport can be used to go both 45 minutes away on domestic flight or half across the globe.
Similarly, airports require a high up front capital cost and form a network that allows you to reach further than the infrastructure at the starting point allows.
On rail having high maintenance cost for the infrastructure: every flight requires expensive and fragile planes + lots of fuel, so the marginal cost of each trip is high.
So it's a little more complicated to compare the costs than you suggest.
https://www.euronews.com/travel/2022/10/04/spain-short-and-m...
https://www.lonelyplanet.com/articles/spain-free-train-trips
https://nomadguide.eu/spain-free-trains-explained/
https://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-news/free-public-tra...
https://www.traveloffpath.com/you-can-travel-through-spain-f...
Price attracts new customers, quality loyalises them (Its a quote from a local rapper. Not train related, but it applies to any business)
Bus is dirt cheap and ok for some trips. Plane is a bit more expensive.
but I'm still willing to take the train (first class) for the extra convenience, especialy when I cross the country several times over a weekend.
Also, plane is only kinda cheap when you book it a long time ago and for peculiar hours and dates. It gets really expensive last minute or on days when demand increases, while train companies can just scale up the number of seats by using more carriages
LAS-LAX Las Vegas - Los Angeles 286,262 - Take a damn train
HNL-OGG Honolulu - Kahului 281,548 - Maybe don't take a train for that one unless you want to dig a tunnel.
JFK-LAX New York JFK - Los Angeles 274,909 - Alright, plane is useful
LGA-ORD New York La Guardia - Chicago O'Hare 263,499 - Take a damn train
DEN-LAS Denver - Las Vegas 253,959 - Take a damn train
LAX-SFO Los Angeles - San Francisco 247,571 - Take a damn train
ATL-MCO Atlanta - Orlando 239,281 - Take a damn train
LAX-ORD Los Angeles - Chicago O'Hare 231,252 - Flight
DEN-PHX Denver - Phoenix 226,666 - Take a damn train
JFK-SFO New York JFK - San Francisco 215,323 - Flight
Most of your busiest routes could easily be done by train, and even land right in the city instead of being in the middle of nowhere when you land. And that's the busiest routes! Most lesser used flights will be for cities close to one another. Being in a train also lets you work, use your laptop, have internet, get up and walk, grab (overpriced) food in a bar wagon, have a wagon for children to play in, etc. Trains are just better.
So, no, you can't use the "but the US is big" argument every time, sorry.
For example, practically everything involving LAS is connecting to something else which goes further. Orlando is probably the terminus thanks to Disney, but ATL is likely not the originator.
Probably the only route which definitely isn't a hub connector is LAX-SFO as both LAX and SFO are already hubs in and unto themselves. Maybe, LGA-ORD also falls into a similar category.
Here's a video from Wendover Productions about the laws surrounding ownership vs control:
I hope/wish this isn't their motivation. I think people that take suitcases as carry-on are one of the biggest annoyances of flying domestically in the US. Delays everyone getting on and off the plane and leaves no space for items people genuinely need on the plane.
I imagine you're a casual flyer? As someone who has traveled a lot for work I can't agree. I'm someone who needs to move from A->B quickly and can't be bothered worrying about luggage being lost or dealing with delays at the carrousel.
> Delays everyone getting on and off the plane and leaves no space for items people genuinely need on the plane.
Like what? If it's your laptop/similar it can be in a backpack/small bag under the seat. If it's a jacket it can rest behind you on the seat or if you have a bit of space in your bag (under seat or overhead luggage) toss it in there prior to boarding, it's what I always did.
There obviously isn't enough space on the plane for every passenger to take a max-size carry-on suitcase. Therefore, anyone taking one is using more than their fair share, and they should be the ones accommodating the other passengers -- yet it's usually the opposite . These people are usually the ones rushing to board first and taking longer to arrange the luggage. I agree with the GP that these people are the most annoying feature of short-haul flights.
lol what? where does he say anything about needing special treatment? everyone's in the same overhead bin lottery unless you paid for business class or whatever.
i do exactly what the parent comment said as well. you're allowed a carryon and a small backpack. you put the carryon overhead and stuff your backpack at your feet. you either sit on your jacket or stuff it in your bag before you board. important stuff (work laptop, house keys) stays in the backpack and always with you. sometimes they force you to gate check your bag, which is not ideal but fine. keep the backpack.
i traveled a medium amount for work and ended up getting a soft sided duffel. for full flights they start calling for gate checking carryons before they even start boarding. i think this is mostly to save time though, even if there was enough overhead space. i noticed you get preferential treatment with a duffel and several times where they'd let me through but make the person in front of or behind me gate check their bags if they were rollers, even though the bins were "full".
if work was paying i tried to only book direct flights. then i could gate check my bag, board last, and spend as little time crammed on the plane as possible. but my preference was to do carryon as well to save time, especially if there was a connection.
Carry-on is more pleasant for the individual in many cases, as the risk of loss is zero and you don't need to wait at baggage claim.
But when everybody does it is sucks. Boarding and deboarding takes way longer. Overhead space consistently runs out and requires people to check bags anyway.
A friend had to put their carry on away from their seat, and someone else took it (by accident), but by the time my acquaintence’s turn came to get their bag, the other person was so far ahead of them, my friend was unable to catch up to them before they left the airport.
They got it back, but now I keep an eye on my carry on, especially when deboarding. And also have a unique, hard to miss tag on it.
Now, yes. I used to travel a lot for work and held the same opinion then. But my speed requirements must have been different I guess.
Items people genuinely need in the cabin are items they will use whilst in the cabin. It'd be nice if nobody had to have their laptop bag or kids essentials on top of their feet.
You check your luggage, right?
Then you're going to end up waiting at the luggage carousel no matter how long it takes for you to get off the plane.
* Restrooms
* Potentially friendly faces
* Wifi
* Dramatically less claustrophobia
Like the linked article, I also had a bag lost returning from honeymoon. That bag was never returned. It took me more than a year to get the airline to provide any compensation. (SDR 1,500) SDR = "Special Drawing Right, roughly $1,300 at today's conversion rate.
One such case was a connection through Houston where there was a huge electrical storm that delayed flights and forced ramp crew indoors for their protection. After the storm passed the decision was made to get the passengers out even if their bags were late. My bag was delivered to my hotel the following day.
Other cases have been extremely tight connections (that I have willingly chosen to book, against my better judgement) where there is barely enough time to get ME to the connection much less a bag buried in a hold somewhere.
From your link, the success rate for bag transportation ranges from 99.85% to 99.07%.
I honestly don't know how much better it can get.
There must be something going on that people have a perception that bag loss is common, because I take 30-50 trips per year, almost all of them through Chicago (which has a reputation) and almost all of them 2 legs, which is 160 loading operations per year (~40 trips, two legs each, round trip) and no unexplained bag losses or delays.
Is there a specific mode of air travel, like the crazy weird itineraries that people come up with to save $60 on airfare? Or weird, oddly-shaped, hard-to-handle bags? (I've seen taped-up coolers and trash bags used as checked luggage)
Broken luggage? That's a different story. Airlines have broken so many of my suitcases that I now transport my dirty laundry home in a Pelican Air 1615.
(edit: and they're doing their best to break that-- good luck!)
1) For every bag that’s carry-on is one that a baggage handler doesn’t have to deal with (as well as reducing risks of losing it and all those logistics), so they can reduce the number of people they need to pay.
2) Unused overhead space is wasted space. They’re spending a huge amount of fuel to transport X cubic feet of space from one place to another. If the overheads are half empty, that’s wasted space. They want all the overhead space to be used so they have more space available in the hold.
That extra space in the hold is something they can sell. They can carry tons of FedEx envelopes, Amazon packages, etc. as cargo, and of course they can make more money from that than if they used the space for passengers who already paid for the space in the cabin.
This trend may be changing post-covid (still remains to be seen).
Personally, having moved with 2 kids and ~8 pieces of baggage to and from Europe recently (and getting priority treatment about 60% of time)… I don’t wanna see a suitcase in my life ever again.
1) Couple arrived with no bags.
2) Couple put in "lost bag" notice with Air Canada.
3) Air Canada didn't find the bag within 30 days and paid compensation (per law).
4) Couple deposited compensation.
5) The bag (along with others) in a big pile was donated to charity.
The status of the bag is iffy once compensation is paid.
IANAL, but I think its like the cases where a car is stole, insurance pays out, and then the car is recovered. You don't own that car in that case.
What's the basis for asserting it was lost baggage compensation?
This is similar to how car insurance or home content insurance works. Most people think the value of something for insurance or compensation is the price they paid, which is wrong. The value is the price currently of a comparable item for sale.
If the car you paid $50K for 8 years ago gets stolen, they don't give you $50K for it but instead the price of comparable 8 year old car.
Same thing with home insurance. If someone comes in and steals your MacBook Pro which you paid $5000 for 8 years ago, they don't give you $5000. They find out how much a similar MacBook Pro sells for on ebay, etc and give you that.
The article states the couple was compensated for 25% of the value of the luggage, whereas the passenger's bill of rights seems to say that the airline is liable for the full value of the lost luggage, up to a limit.
Which was submitted in response to your previous comment that The “delay bag” is only paid if it’s delayed. If it’s lost then it’s not paid and then “lost” is paid.
I am not interested in your exposition of how insurance works, which is a distraction from the simpler question of 'lost or delayed'. Out of courtesy, I think you should respond to that other poster's point instead of grinding your axe on mine.
Paying out 25% of the value is not a fair compensation when they're too lazy to retrieve a tracked bag.
Home insurance actually works _exactly_ this way. As long as you have a mortgage in the US, you're going to be required to carry enough insurance to pay for the full cost of completely rebuilding a similar brand new home in the event the home is destroyed.
Let say you buy brand new MacBook Pro for $5000 in 2016. Someone breaks into your home and steals it. Most people when they file the insurance claim thinks the value of the MacBook Pro is $5000 (what they paid for it), but that's not true. The value is the price of a similar 2016 era MacBook Pro on second hand market places (ebay, etc). So lets say that 2016 MacBook Pro similar to yours is selling for $800 on ebay, insurance will compensate you $800.
With RCV coverage they will pay for a new MacBook Pro with similar RAM and storage and screen.
I’d guess that most people on HN go for RCV on their homeowners’ insurance. I remember once looking into how much I would save if I switch the personal property coverage of my homeowner’s policy from RCV to ACV and while I don’t remember the amount I remember my reaction was “it’s that little!?” and I kept it RCV.
This is at least partially addressed in the article.
> “So I looked into the terms and conditions to see if me accepting compensation changed over ownership to Air Canada, and there’s nothing,” she said, adding that their bag has been “wrongfully donated.”
I think this is reasonable. Just because the airline paid compensation doesn't mean they can donate bags that they don't own. At the very least, they should have some kind of publicly accessible database to list these for a while before donation.
In no scenario does donating bags that they have misplaced make sense, should be enough data on the luggage to know who it belongs to and at least ask them to collect it or offer to post it.
It's not my fault that the airline luggage handling system tore off their tag.
I don't care if it costs the airline $5000 to reunite me with my $50 luggage. Tough noogies for the airline.
We need to get out of this mindset that companies get to inconvenience individuals and then get to set the compensation level, too.
If airlines had to pay out $10,000 per lost bag, they'd be stellar about tracking bags.
It seems terrible that people should be forced to sell their luggage to an airline... because the airline lost it.
At the time the airline offers compensation, the choice is between nothing and whatever the airline offers. That's can hardly be considered a fair exchange of ownership. Obviously, it's built in to the situation that there is a low chance the luggage will be recovered.
I'd say if the luggage is recovered, the airline could request money back, minus an amount to compensate the travelers for the inconvenience and the temporary loss of the items. Consider, e.g., that they may have needed to replace some items on short notice. If the amount the airline paid is as small as is suggested here, it doesn't sound like they should get much of anything back. Note that the travelers recovered the luggage themselves.
I'm not familiar with the canadian banking system but it looks like the money was directly posted ("push") rather than provided in a way that required positive action on the part of the recipient.
Therefore, if the money was indeed sent through e-Transfer, then it is possible that the Couple received the compensation without any positive action. I am not sure if one could make the argument that the onus is on the Couple to actively reject the compensation and reverse the transfer.
They asked me for the login and they were going to use Find to get to the phone. I got there first and it turns out it was just lost. But I was surprised that they would use it.
If that's genuinely what they do, would be nice if Apple implemented a police version of 'Find my Friends' to let you give them permission to track the device rather than the password.
I doubt the police (the person, not the organisation) knows or cares what else can be done with the password, to them it's just the hoop they need to jump through to see what they need to see for the task at hand.
I wouldn't imagine they would have the organisational capability to misuse those passwords, other than the individual realising they could look through iCloud photos or something.
It's still bad, and Apple should implement a sharing or law enforcement mode for this case, but I doubt it's malicious at the state level.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depend...
We have much fewer officers per capita than France or Germany, but these countries have much less crime than we do. Considering how much crime we have, we should have way more police than other countries, but it’s not the reality.
https://academic.oup.com/bjc/advance-article-abstract/doi/10...
recent evidence in police budget reductions
Only about 8% of US cities have reallocated police founding elsewhere; most have increased it since 2020, and in nearly half of jurisdictions it has risen by >10%.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/defunding-claims-police-funding-in...
The US also spends more than most other developed countries as a % of GDP, though less than Russia and Costa Rica: https://www.workandmoney.com/s/police-spending-by-country-98...
I don't have access to this study, so I cannot really comment on it, but this is just one study. When you take the evidence as a whole, the picture is quite different. See for example this systematic review, which looked at 49 separate studies and it did find that, yes, "police presence has mostly crime reduction effects on crimes related to motor theft, property, violence and guns. Police presence also reduces calls for service and improves traffic behaviour".
Additionally, these misdemeanor arrests have been very useful in reducing violent crime rate in NYC. NYC cops under Giuliani and Bloomberg would harass people for trivial shit, find guns on them that they weren't allowed to possess, and then throw the book at them for it. This resulted in carrying a gun being too risky activity for NYC criminals, which resulted in great reduction in shootings, homicide, and other crime involving use of guns like robbery and carjacking. Now, of course, one might object to this strategy, based on morality or legality of it, but what you cannot object to is whether it worked, because it clearly did. This is my point: police activity reduces crime.
> Only about 8% of US cities have reallocated police founding elsewhere; most have increased it since 2020, and in nearly half of jurisdictions it has risen by >10%.
Given that inflation since 2020 has been over 10%, that means that more than half of jurisdiction did cut police funding in real terms.
> The US also spends more than most other developed countries as a % of GDP, though less than Russia and Costa Rica: https://www.workandmoney.com/s/police-spending-by-country-98...
And Russia and Costa Rica indeed have crime rates similar to ours. Rather more importantly than spend, though, is how much we actually get for it. Seems like policing is another one of those fields, like medicine and education, where we spend more than other countries as a percentage of GDP, but get less value for the spend. This is why I'm talking about actual metrics like police officers per capita, not dollars spent on policing.
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/relation...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10610-021-09500-8
> The systematic search strategies yielded 49 studies focusing on testing the effects of police presence or evaluating its measurement. We find evidence that police presence has mostly crime reduction effects on crimes related to motor theft, property, violence and guns. Police presence also reduces calls for service and improves traffic behaviour. Police presence focused on specific areas, times and types of crime achieves maximum effectiveness. The reviewed studies show a high degree of heterogeneity in reporting which limits comparability of findings across studies. Research on police presence presents evidence for significant crime preventative effects of focused police actions and shows strongest effects when focused on certain areas, times, or types of crimes
Look at the 49 studies they went through. Most of them show that adding officers lowers crime. Now you have seen the data.
Now, given that the homicide rate gap is real and not just reporting artifact, what about other crime? It stands to reason that the disparities there are also real, but there still might be differences in reporting, which could either exaggerate or diminish the reported gap. Which is it?
In my view, the latter is true: the gap between US and Europe is even worse than it seems. This whole thread is a great example: Americans don’t even bother reporting a lot of crime, because it is a common knowledge that it won’t do much. In Europe, people report much more petty crime, because the cops will actually follow up on a lot of it, and the justice system will actually punish the offenders. This means that the real crime gap is even bigger than the reported one.
This is also clear to anyone who actually has experience living in both places. I grew up in Poland, I live in relatively safe US city (Seattle), and the amount of crime I observe here is probably a whole order of magnitude higher than I did back in Poland.
> And secondly because there are absolutely detrimental effects of policing, and this would lead into a conversation more about what the goals of policing should be
Yes, I agree that there is a trade off here. However, in US, the balance is completely lopsided towards the costs of crime. Criminals impose massive burden on everyone around them, including their families. Crime has enormous costs to victims, but also huge negative externalities. For example, if you own a house in a crime ridden neighborhood, then even if you are never a victim of crime yourself, just the fact that people avoid your neighborhood costs you probably tens of thousands of dollars in terms of lost property values. Businesses avoid crime ridden locations, resulting in fewer jobs and services for residents. Really, the negatives of increased policing would have to be quite enormous to make up for the benefits.
For a real world example, look at how much more flourishing NYC has become after Giuliani and Bloomberg cleaned it up. Do you thing that NYC residents would prefer to go back to 1985 era?
> Does incarcerating people too much lead to higher crime rates in the future when they're released?
Compared to what? Even if you ignore deterrence role, incarceration reduces crime purely by incapacitating criminal’s ability to do crime. Hard to victimize people when you’re locked up.
Crime is young men’s game, and most of it is committed by very small fraction of population. They commit most of their crime between 16 and 35, with crime activity sharply tapering thereafter. If you incarcerate those repeat offenders for many years, and release them only once they are older and cooled off, than increase in criminality induced by incarceration will be more than made up by reduction in criminality during prime crime years.
We need to incarcerate more people, and do it for longer. That’s exactly how we achieved long decrease in crime, starting in mid 90s. People understood that. Senator Joe Biden was major sponsor of crime reform bill that was designed to do exactly that, put more criminals in jail for longer. It’s a shame that we were made to forget that, and now we reap the fruit of reduced policing and increased criminal exuberance, with crime rates hugely spiking starting from June 2020.
I cannot respect this claim at all. Incarceration destroys lives when it overwhelmingly doesn't need to happen. Taking away the most formative years of someone's life and then releasing them into society after endless years of inhumane treatment with no meaningful income or resources is absolutely not a net positive for society. Throwing people in prison only worsens the problems of poverty and systemic racism which leads to further crime.
There are a lot of factors that went into crime decreases in the 90s, and it was happening before the crime bill. The crime bill was awful to the point that Biden himself called it a big mistake.
Look, I simply do not care much about well-being of repeat offenders. If someone is getting convicted for their third felony, then given the reporting, clearance and conviction rates, it is highly likely that this is more like 10th-20th felony he committed, not 3rd. This means that he victimized a lot of people, and if we let him out, he'll likely victimize many more. Why don't you think about the well being of the victims, instead of that of the criminal? They typically cannot do much to avoid being victimized, whereas for the criminal, it is very easy to avoid jail: all he needs to do is to not commit crime. Overwhelming majority of people, including some very poor ones, manage to do it. If you don't want to waste your youth in jail, stop committing crime, what is the problem with this message?
Yes, I do, and I think we are creating more victims of crime over the long term with with our current approach to incarceration.
> I simply do not care much about well-being of repeat offenders
I really hope you have the opportunity to meet and spend time with people who have done significant time in prison. There are some absolute shit people in prison, but the vast majority of them are really well-meaning, well-intentioned, loving human beings who've made mistakes. People who have committed crimes aren't intentionally trying to create victims in the vast majority of cases. They're making poor decisions or finding themselves in poor situations that result in victims. And in a massive amount of cases, there's no victim at all (thanks war on drugs).
People find themselves in difficult places in life. Likely difficult ways you've never dreamed of. People get desperate. People get to the end of their rope. People lack support systems. People are the product of inter-generational poverty and struggling in large part due to, you guessed it, the massive scale of incarceration in this country. People are responsible for their actions. But given a lot of circumstances, I understand why they made the choices they did, even if someone else got hurt as a result. It doesn't justify it, but it's understandable.
These are real human beings and it's really sad to hear you don't care about the well-being of fellow humans.
I think you are very wrong here, but I don’t think that there is anything at all that could possibly convince you otherwise.
> I really hope you have the opportunity to meet and spend time with people who have done significant time in prison. There are some absolute shit people in prison, but the vast majority of them are really well-meaning, well-intentioned, loving human beings who've made mistakes.
The only people I know who have been in prison are members of my extended family, who I would by no means describe as well-meaning, well intentioned, loving human beings. So no, I don’t find very convincing.
But, even granting this, if someone is found by the justice system to have committed a serious, felony-level “mistake” three separate times (which in practice means he committed this “mistake” many more times, given the gaps in detection and conviction rates), it is beside the point whether they were “well-intentioned”: if they repeatedly keep “finding themselves in poor situations that result in victims”, we need to prevent them from creating any more victims, and prison is extremely effective at this job.
> People are the product of inter-generational poverty and struggling in large part due to, you guessed it, the massive scale of incarceration in this country.
In huge swaths of the world, poverty is much, much higher than in poorest places in America, but crime is relatively nonexistent. Consider, for example, Bangladesh, where average income is less than what you get in US from food stamps alone, but homicide rate is less than half of US. Even in US, huge majority of poor people do not commit crime. Being poor is extremely poor excuse for crime, when huge majority of the poor manages to avoid breaking into other people’s homes to steal their valuables, or beating other people to within an inch of their life.
> But given a lot of circumstances, I understand why they made the choices they did, even if someone else got hurt as a result. It doesn't justify it, but it's understandable.
In many cases I also do understand that, but it only makes me despise them even more. Overwhelming majority of people, including very poor and down-trodden people would not do the same thing in their shoes. However, in other cases I simply do not find any reasonable explanation whatsoever. The guy who threatened to beat me up as I was waiting for the bus has no reason to do it whatsoever, and he definitely did not appear loving and well intentioned.
> These are real human beings and it's really sad to hear you don't care about the well-being of fellow humans.
Yes, I do not care about the well being of some fellow humans, if they committed acts which clearly and unequivocally proved them not deserving of being treated charitably, and who by those acts destroyed well being of many other people. Crime is really heinous thing, and its damaging impact on victims is really understated. You asked me to meet and spend time with crime perpetrators. I ask you in return to spend time with crime victims instead. It appears to me that you care much less about them than about people victimizing them.
Devil's advocate: The airline doesn't have access to the tracking data that the customer did. It's one of hundreds of bags they can't find owners for. Donating them doesn't seem like too bad of an option, provided they still make the customer whole.
Bag lost? Just share the tag location with a ticket-specific email generated by the booking system, and some division of luggage services at the airline has the job description of delegating the finding of the luggage based on that data.
Hard agree.
> The airline doesn't have access to the tracking data that the customer did.
If that's the case, the customers could have done better. Last year I had a delayed baggage with TAP Portugal. My suitcase stayed in Lisbon and never arrived with me in Brazil. I had an AirTag in it. I sent daily emails to TAP with screenshots of FindMy showing that my bag was within a specific area of the Lisbon airport.
> It's one of hundreds of bags they can't find owners for.
They can certainly do better if that's the case. The bag has a tag with a number and a barcode. Those should point to a specific customer. The customer has already complained about the lost bag. The system should be able to match those 2 ends easily.
> Donating them doesn't seem like too bad of an option, provided they still make the customer whole.
Often getting money doesn't make the customer whole. There are personal items in a bag. There are special gift pieces of clothing. There might be mementos from the trip. There could be other items and artefacts that are irreplaceable to the customer. Money only makes it less bad but it will never completely compensate for the loss of those things.
Even if they did that, doesn't everyone out a luggage tag on their bags with name and contact info?
This just feels like the price of blowing off customers is entirely too low.
These can get caught on things and detach occasionally. It's rare enough that it will probably never happen to you in your lifetime but common enough that it happens to many people every day.
given that over 13 million trips were taken on air canada alone even if they lost 1 in every 1000 bags (assuming roughly 1 bag per passenger which may not be accurate) then there would be 13,000 bags lost every year
I pretty much never do. But I should.
Merely compensating for damages implies the bag was lost in good faith. I can't just steal your car and pay you fair market value for it without your agreement.
It's not clear the airline could really determine which bag it was. I imagine these lost baggage centers have a very large amount of bags. Finding it is a needle in a hackstack problem under the likely assumption that the bag is lost because the airline paper tag was missing or unreadable.
There aren't enough facts to determine any active choice was made here. The airline should pay for the bag, but nothing seem malicious here.
They should be required to show some good faith effort that their labelling system is design to be reliable instead of the cheapest possible, and also show they have made a good faith effort to return the mound of lost bags.
But this is also why I leave a business card or two inside the suitcase.
Nothing about how the airline handled this is reasonable. The couple was tracking their bag as soon as it didn't show up at baggage claim. They knew exactly where it was when they filed the lost bag report. The airline actively ignored this information and spent weeks doing nothing meaningful about it before paying up for the lost bag.
What you describe is a reasonable outcome when the airline has no way of knowing where the bag went, but this simply was not the case here.
There are two kinds of scannable identification placed on luggage. The first is the more obvious loop tag, and the second are 2 secondary smaller barcode stickers, at least one of which is placed on the luggage directly in case the main tag is somehow removed.
Beyond that there are also the manual bag tags/slide-outs which most luggage still utilises, as well as the international bag-tracking service used by airlines. Additionally customers are instructed to describe their bag and contents as part of the lost bag process.
Because of this bags can be reunited with owners. The ones that are not seem to stem from staffing and procedural issues, which explains why some airlines are notorious for losing bags (e.g. AirEuropa.)
In too many cases already we see people who are able to locate their lost bag via an AirTag being ignored. AirTags also reveal that bags are often lost multiple times, such as when a person takes a holiday and their bags arrive well after they have left - complicating the recovery as the bag is now lost in a foreign airport and all recovery efforts are at arm's length.
This strikes me as something cheap to implement that would help everyone involved.
Could there be a financial incentive for Apple?
Even if Apple didn't charge directly for it (and they could charge the Airlines to cut down on lost baggage) they'd get a boost in sales of the AirTags.
While I personally have never had a bad luggage experience, I've heard countless horror stories. Being able to watch my bag move around the airport and eventually board my plane provides a lot of peace of mind.
Is the fact that the data was corrupted, or there was a software issue that this couldn't match up.
Or are the bags just listed as being on a flight, and routed to the collection carousel.
Or is a case of the manager at the bag handling facility was under staffed, and overwhelmed by this all and just tried to be rid of the problem?
I know we all concentrate on the failures in the system like this but the logistics involved in getting bags off a plane then delivered to dozens of different connecting flights while the same thing happens on dozens of other planes as well as adhoc "checked at the gate" bags getting added in with everything being correctly sorted, grouped, and transported 99% of the time, often with less than an hour to do it, is kind of amazing.
Yet FedEx seems to have a way lower rate of missing packages.
Once the bags are recorded with baggage service and they've been in the federated database for so long, if the owners do not claim, the contents are donated where appropriate.
The bags themselves sometimes are set aside as ad hoc replacements for anyone who has a bag badly damaged in handling or other mishap.
When its donated the charity, there is an agreement that the charity will remove any PII or personalized stuff before selling the rest.
They certainly do not want to do so, but the capability existed and they declined to exercise it.
Once the owner’s put it in Lost Mode, which all of those beeping bags were in, then you just visit the link it gives you when you scan it (it can do NFC, it doesn’t even require an Apple device) and the owner’s contact information is shown.
The airline’s behavior instead resembles: “We couldn’t see any contact information in the outside and maybe we checked a zipper pocket for a piece of paper but ultimately we would rather give up and pay you a lost bag fee, than have to employ a human being to put more than thirty seconds of effort into each bag.”
Sure, why not? Let them in and have staff on hand with them requiring them to prove ownership by identifying the contents. Would that cost a lot to the airline? You bet, which is why they don't make the effort. But airlines never make an effort to help passengers unless the government tells them they must. So either make it mandatory or impose punitive damages when airlines lose bags (far above the cost of the luggage).
Maybe the airline would make an honest effort not to lose baggage if they were actually held accountable.
Yes. Especially when you can make your bag beep by tapping a button on your phone.
When you grab a bag from baggage claim, nobody cross-checks your ID against the bag. We already trust people not to steal. If you steal from a warehouse, the same thing would happen as if you stole from a baggage claim.
Take a photo of yourself, the bag, and visible luggage tag prior to checking it in.
From the perspective of the airline they were unclaimed — likely the tags had torn off and the airline had no idea who to connect the bag to.
Maybe it would be a nice service to incorporate AirTag tracing for unclaimed luggage, especially if the tracing was based on a standard and not specific to a single luxury brand. But regardless that would be a new SOP and isn’t part of the current one.
How did you reach the conclusion that it's "likely" the tags had torn off?
I don't think any of your assumptions are founded. If the airline decides the cost to pay out is cheaper than the cost to return, then paying out would be a totally reasonable business decision. Frankly without any more detailed (internal) information, I don't think you should presume such things.
Anyway like I said all of this is speculative. But I find it interesting that you and I have such diametrically opposed viewpoints when it comes to this.
The bag was lost for 9 days, with zero updates on the tracing report. The last update was in the connecting airport. We managed to find it, sitting placed at the destination airport with a few hundred other bags, tags were 100% fine on our bags and the others. At any point someone could have walked through, scanned the bags, and updated the tracing reports. But nobody did.
This isn’t because the tags were ripped off, it’s because it’s Air Canada’s SOP.
Young and naive with airline travel, my wife lost her childhood bear when the airline lost our luggage, and we arrived in another country with nothing. Decades on and long divorced, I still get multiple punches in the gut and attacks of tears when I'm reminded of her broken-hearted lament.
in the USA the number is $3800 for domestic flights
Why do they publish something and then put up a barrier to reading it?