After his girlfriend's bag disappears, a multimillionaire developer builds a website to track and rank airlines according to luggage loss. Pieter Levels, a multimillionaire developer, has taken a risk by creating a website called 'LuggageLosers.com' that ranks airlines according to their current rates of luggage loss. This is a daring attempt to bring attention to the persistent problem of lost luggage.

The service, which launched last week, gives travelers information on how well different airlines handle baggage using real-time data. After his girlfriend's suitcase vanished off a Vueling Airlines journey from Lisbon to Barcelona, Levels was motivated to establish the website.

luggage loss
Image Source: Passenger Terminal Today

The airline had promised to bring the suitcase to their hotel in Barcelona, but it never showed up. At the airport, Levels and his girlfriend could even see the suitcase, but the airline did not deliver on its promise. Levels were so frustrated by the encounter that he decided to act independently. The website's ranking system takes into consideration variables like flight frequency and fleet size to account for the different sizes of airlines.

Impact of Luggage Mishandling on Travelers

The airline that loses the most luggage is Air India, an Indian carrier. Aer Lingus, WestJet Airlines, British Airways, Iberia, and SpiceJet are the next in line. Conversely, All Nippon Airways of Japan has the lowest rate of misplaced luggage, closely followed by Alaska Airlines and LATAM Brazil.

Due to airlines' inconsistent publication of lost luggage statistics, the rankings are mainly based on information obtained from social media. Levels does concede, though, that the reliability and existence of internet reviews and complaints determine how accurate the rankings are.

Role of LuggageLosers.com in Informing and Influencing

In addition to giving travelers useful information to help them make decisions, Levels believes that the website will encourage the airline sector to enhance its baggage handling procedures. He hopes to hold airlines responsible and motivate them to put the needs of their customers first by bringing attention to the problem and assigning rankings based on that information.

Social media users have been talking about LuggageLosers.com and sharing their own lost luggage stories, which has started a discourse about Levels' project. It is unclear if the website's increasing popularity will have a long-term effect on how the airline industry manages passenger belongings.

The data indicates that in 2023, airlines misplaced almost 2 million bags or 0.51% of the hundreds of millions of bags they handled. About 80% of these misplaced bags were postponed rather than lost forever. The number of luggage mishandled (i.e., delayed, damaged, stolen, or lost) increased from 4.35 to 7.6 bags per 1,000 passengers in 2022. The mishandling rate for luggage on foreign flights was 19.3 per 1,000 passengers. Airlines can take up to three months to locate the owner of a misplaced piece of luggage.

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