Travelling is always exciting and the feeling you get just as you touch down in a foreign place is out of this world… until you stand at the baggage carousel forever, watching the flow of bags gradually dwindle down into nothing and yet, your bags are no where in sight.
Whether the bags are lost or delayed, check-in luggages are often mishandled by airport staff and there’s really nothing much we can do about it. Of course, we’d be left wondering where they might have been misplaced, or if someone had stolen your property.
Well, a Reddit user called RabbitMix who claims to work in a bag room at an airport and has listed some probable explanations:
I work in the bag room, and let me tell you how bags get left behind/’lost’ going from most frequent to least (keep in mind I’m speaking from experience at my station/airline, yours may be different):
TSA pulled your bag for extra screening and took way too long doing it and got it to the airline like 10 minutes after your flight left.
Somebody in the bag room f*cked up (usually a new hire, my company, at least, cycles through employees like a movie theater) and put it in the wrong cart for a flight that leaves 2 hours after yours and it didn’t get caught until the ramp crew started loading that flight.
Your bag got caught somewhere on the bag belt or it sent it to the wrong place.
Curbside was supposed to bring your bag to the bag room because it was oversize or the computer that sorts the bags couldn’t scan your bag tag (in either case it gets sent to a special carousel) but they were busy/forgot to check and didn’t get to it until it was too late.
You checked your bag really close to departure time and it just didn’t make it through the belt system in time (takes about 15 mins if TSA doesn’t get involved at my station) so we didn’t get it until after departure.
You checked your bag really early (like 5+ hours) and since there wasn’t room for it’s flight in the bag room yet it went in a corner so people wouldn’t keep tripping over it and was forgotten about.
It fell off the bag cart on the way to the plane and nobody noticed (highly unlikely).
… and that’s how your bags get lost in 95% or cases.
Now, you know.
[Source]
