A live ranking of airlines by how much luggage they are losing

The US DOT publishes "Mishandled Baggage" statistics. These lump together lost and damaged, but for example states that Delta was around a 1 out of 256 chance to get "mishandled"... so, I'm not sure if the stats on this page are really all that far off - they seem all within the range of believable to me.

It says it is normalized against actual published lost baggage statistics.

You can calculate a ratio of social media complaints to lost bags for airlines you have data on and then infer a loss rate for airlines that don't release data.

Someone can just create a Twitter account, tweet that $airline lost their luggage, and skew the statistics.. considering there's some magic maths in the background...

Maybe. Or maybe Japanese travellers don't complain about their lost luggage on social media like Indian travellers do?

Since the source seems to be social media posts, there's a small possibility that theft may be some kind of portion of the number, but I'm not sure due to the questionable accuracy of source data.

Semi-related: I work for a homeless service agency and a few of our clients were arrested for a tiny luggage theft ring at LAX a couple of months ago. One of the detectives said that some of the luggage they found was reported missing and it was luck that someone else had airtags hidden in their luggage to be able to track the item which allowed them to discover more items from others.

I would think it's more likely that luggage handling is centralized at major hubs. For example, there was the infamous Denver Airport Baggage System that was plagued with issues and has been the subject of much analysis [0].

0: https://www5.in.tum.de/~huckle/DIABaggage.pdf

Forgot to answer your actual question: Delta does directly handle its ramp operations at ATL, as well as at BOS, CVG, DTW, MSP, MIA, and SEA. But in the US there are state and federal labor laws to consider and where possible, they, like the other major airlines, offload a lot of staffing generally to Unifi or similar specialist staffing agents. Unifi used to be part of Delta until spun off and sold around 2018 if I remember correctly. Beforer then they were called Delta Global Staffing and primarily handled temp hiring. Now it is 49% owned by Delta but covers hiring for United and Alaska and a few others where possible, and provides the training and certs and all that as well, temp or full time, where possible, including some ramp positions at ATL. SLC, LAX, LGA, JFK are all Delta hubs and positions for ramp agents are entirely absent on Delta's career's page, but on Unifi there are pages and pages that cover almost everywhere in North America where Delta flies. Compare Unifi's open careers page: https://unifi.avature.net/careers to Delta's: https://delta.avature.net/en_US/careers and it should be pretty obvious as to the difference.

This is a bit of generally not very useful osint info but a subdomain search on HR platforms can reveal at least to some degree the labor situation at a lot of entities. avature has over 4000 subdomains in their dns records on securitytrails alone. Not all are for staging or VPN access or SMTP. Some are no longer active, but most do resolve. That's medium potatoes at best compared to the 10k+ at bamboohr. Although if you are doing OSINT you're probably not going for a job at a lot of these staffing agencies anyway. Ever since I was asked to leave a Cutco presentation in 2011 I haven't applied for a job since and I've been poached multiple times and am basically retired at 37. But this is a neat trick and I like dataset gathering for its own sake, and it definitely gives off an interesting view of the economy that may or may not reflect how any one feels about how things are going.

(If I need a job, I prefer fangraphs or baseballprospectus anyway, but they aren't hiring anyone who filed tax returns as professional gambler, sadly)

I know that it at least differs between the US and Europe. I've known ramp agents in a few countries and in the US the contracts in the end are handled by the airlines and training/regulation is governed by the FAA. The couple of European ramp agents are ultimately contracted to the airport (or really, the entity that operates the airport). This is a small sample, but there definitely exists more than one model of how ground staff is managed that is the norm. To further complicate things, the company that pays you may be a subsidiary of the airline you work for or sometimes a different airline or group of airlines, operating under a different name.

I'll give you an illustrative example that hopefully demonstrate how convoluted things can get. Swissport is one of the largest ground services providers in the world. It was first split off from Swissair as its in-house ground service department and became an entity under the holding company SAirGroup in the mid 90s, after plans to merge several of the flag carriers of smaller European countries fell apart when Swiss citizens voted not to join the EEA and therefore, denying Swissair of access to both 5th freedom rights in the EEA and potential cabotage rights. A few years later shortly after 9/11 the airline collapsed as did the holding group which resulted in Swissport being sold off to private equity (Swiss International took over operations on the airline side, sort of, by virtue of a Swiss government bailout and the acquisition of Crossair, the regional arm of Swissair that was divested earlier, by the creditor banks, but in a ton of debt and had to recoup as much as possible. Swissport continued operating after it was sold off and maintained relationships with, well, eventually just about every major airline through mergers and acquisitions, Crossair became Swiss International and was taken over by Lufthansa in 2005. Swissport has maintained relationships with Swiss through Lufthansa but only provides full service to Swiss at ZRH and cargo service at Basel (which Swiss pulled out of in 2015 on the commercial side, and also, is actually located in France, at least airside). It also handles regional operations for Lufthansa out of Munich. ZRH is the main Swiss hub and also a Lufthansa hub, but the fact that Swissport provides full ground service there is almost happenstance since Swiss serves over 100 other destinations and Swissport over 200, many of which overlap, but they do not directly serve the airline elsewhere except cargo operations to Basel. But there is another major airport in Switzerland, and Swissport operates there, but Swiss and Lufthansa Group uses dnata as their handling agent, a subsidiary of Emirates. dnata has no presence in Basel and is a minority operator in ZRH, where Swissport handles something like 80%+ of all ground operations. If you fly Swiss to just about anywhere else in the world, you'll see Swissport, but they aren't likely, save for some prior arrangement where airlines with limited presence may agree to contract through another airline, to essentially provide service in a separate agreement, but these are more ad hoc and subject to change and affects relatively few flights in comparison.

Lufthansa had its own ground services arm that it sold off - LSG Sky Chefs. Gategroup, which owns Gate Gourmet, was the Swissair catering service until being spun off in the same mid 90s expansion that ended up in the collapse. Swissair is no longer an active brand, but it is still valuable to an extent, so it is licensed out, although I have no idea where - like how Pan Am got licensed out to a freight rail carrier, it's likely stamped somewhere random and unrelated to Switzerland or air traffic, but brings in revenue so, why not?

I rarely fly now and when I do, it's domestic US and by charter. That's a whole other crazy mess but somehow, less messy than the scheduled airline industry and far less problematic than the duopoly both having supply chain issues, as both Airbus and Boeing currently does. That's on the news, if you haven't been paying attention, and it's not going away for a bit, by the looks of it. Air travel, meanwhile, remains safer than driving.

You're certainly right about the 922 number showing up way too often -- that has to be a mistake.

It says:

> My robot scours social media platforms 24/7 for people talking about their lost luggage and which airlines they flew, in 100+ different languages. By cross referencing that with actual lost luggage data it estimates very closely how much luggage is constantly being lost.

I think it needs more transparency on how this is working. There are going to be major cultural differences in terms of how often people complain on social media about lost luggage, and also just differences in frequencies of different terms ("lost luggage", "lost bags", "lost bag", "lost my bag", "lost my luggage") in different languages.

I'll trust actual reported lost luggage data, I don't know what the social media robot thing is doing.

Due to birthday paradox with 46, 2 is reasonably possible. But the numbers are suspect also notice 461 and 1843... Either there is no actual data or they are doing some weird percentage calculations...

EDIT: Too many number are divisible by 461...

nice catch, thank you