[dkokelley]

The airline lost the bag. The customers entrusted it to them, and it's pretty clear the fault lies somewhere on the airline's side.

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.

[peeters]

Donating an unclaimed bag is maybe an option (if the recipient is legally required to destroy all personal data). Donating a bag that your passenger has filed a claim for, and can tell you the location of, is a business decision. The penalty in this situation should be so obscenely high as to make it irrational for the airline to consider it.

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.

[rhino369]

>Donating a bag that your passenger has filed a claim for, and can tell you the location of, is a business decision.

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.

[radu_floricica]

Like rhino said above, in all likelyhood the label on the bag was most likely ripped (or it wouldn't be lost in the first place). And trying to describe a bag is... challenging.

[cassianoleal]

> the fault lies somewhere on the airline's side

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.

[quitit]

One probably doesn't need to be too generous with a devil's advocate:

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.

[babypuncher]

When the customer shows up at baggage claim and is able to point out on a map on their iPhone exactly where their bag is, they should be moving hell or high water to locate and return that bag.

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.

[patcon]

Would be nice if airtags were built with a standard for delegating tag locations to companies as an enterprise offering.

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.

[ghaff]

Well, many/most airlines already have bar code tracking. I can look in my United app and see where my bag was last scanned. That said, I do throw an AirTag in as backup on the rare occasions I check a bag.

[tbihl]

I don't understand the mechanism by which they lose both bar codes that are put on the bag. I've never had either one go missing.

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.

[rhino369]

>Even if they did that, doesn't everyone out a luggage tag on their bags with name and contact info?

I pretty much never do. But I should.

[scarby2]

they often only attach one barcode to the bag. (the one around the handle)

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