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Comment by ninth_ant | Hacker News Reader

How is that clear? Nowhere in the blog post does it say that the bags had tag or PII information to identify the owners.

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.

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> 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.

How did you reach the conclusion that it's "likely" the tags had torn off?

If the bag had a readable tag and the database wasn't wrong, then it wouldn't be unclaimed, presumably. Not for certain of course, but you gotta imagine the most common error is that the bag lost its tag and now its impossible to find the owner.

> If the bag had a readable tag and the database wasn't wrong, then it wouldn't be unclaimed, presumably. Not for certain of course, but you gotta imagine the most common error is that the bag lost its tag and now its impossible to find the owner.

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.

I do think its more likely the tag fell off than the airline is lying as a matter of standard operating procedure. I can't exclude the possibility, but I don't think it's as likely.

All of this is speculative, so I can't really say you're wrong, but I find your assumption that the airline wouldn't lie very odd. Businesses lie pretty much constantly as a matter of standard operating procedure. My personal assumption is that when a business tells you that something like this can't be done, they really just mean that they won't do it. I mean it's not like they couldn't track down the bag if they chose to devote the resources to it. I'd basically say that for businesses it is basically _always_ just a question of balancing costs.

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.

I went through an Air Canada lost baggage fiasco this Christmas.

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.

Because if the tags were still attached I’d expect that detail would be included in this article, which is designed around triggering viral outrage.

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