Where exactly does your unclaimed luggage go?

SCOTTSBORO, Ala. – For John Marshall, president and general manager of the Unclaimed Baggage Center here, opening trailers of goods he buys sight unseen from airlines is “like Christmas every day.”

He never knows what he’ll find.

The center is a block-long discount store that resells the suitcases – and their contents – that airlines have been unable to reunite with passengers.

As such, it represents the final failure of a system that damages, delays or loses thousands of checked bags each day.

On average, less than 1 percent of passengers officially file mishandled-baggage reports with major U.S. airlines, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. But the annual rate has been inching upward for the last three years.

Most customers separated from their bags get them back within a day, industry experts say, and only a small percentage lose them forever. Airlines typically spend at least 90 days trying to find the owners before salvaging their possessions.

But with more than 700 million passengers boarding U.S. airlines each year – many around the busy holiday period – the losses add up.

Each day, the Unclaimed Baggage Center in this rural town, about 50 miles southwest of Chattanooga, Tenn., puts out about 7,000 new items culled from 21,000 arrivals, most of which are discarded or donated, Marshall said.

The goods, also sold at www.unclaimedbaggage.com, include clothes, books, baby strollers, cameras, sports equipment and such finery as mink coats and jewelry.

As I surveyed more than a thousand pairs of men’s jeans, hundreds of shoes and such baubles as a $3,600 pair of Tahitian pearls, I began to wonder: How does baggage go astray, and how often?

After talking with dozens of passengers, airline employees and other experts, and getting some behind-the-scenes looks, I learned about the secret life of luggage, which wends its way through a system that mostly works.

And when it doesn’t, it’s not necessarily for the reasons you think.

Your bag’s journey begins with an airline agent attaching a tag to it at the check-in counter. The tag contains a bar code that has a unique bag number plus other data that may identify you, the airport and the flight. This information is also printed on the tag.

The bag then goes to the Transportation Security Administration station for screening. Details of the process begin to vary by airline and location.

Typically, at big airports, the bag is placed on a network of conveyor belts. Built-in scanners use the tag’s bar code to route the bag to the right loading pier.

Reading tags visually, ramp workers pile the bags onto tractors and drive them to the plane. (On bigger jets, bags might go into containers for loading.) On a nonstop flight, workers load bags aft to forward; on a connecting flight, they separate them into bins by stop.

A report, sent by computer to the flight’s next destination, tells workers there how many bags to unload and which bins they’re in. These bags then go to baggage claim or get routed onward.

But sometimes the system doesn’t work just right, resulting in what passengers call “lost luggage.”

“Lost” is actually a misnomer, said John Meenan, executive vice president and chief operating officer of the Air Transport Association, an industry trade group based in Washington, D.C.

Most of the time, “we know where it is,” Meenan told a congressional hearing on mishandled baggage in May. “It just isn’t where it’s supposed to be.”

The biggest trouble spot – causing nearly two-thirds of mishandling incidents – is transferring bags from one flight to another, according to SITA, a Geneva-based technology company largely owned by major airlines.

More than 350 carriers and ground-handling companies use SITA’s WorldTracer software to match errant bags with passengers.

During transfers, bags might be routed several times, multiplying risks inherent in luggage handling. Among them:

“Failure to load: When fliers check in late, connections are too tight, arriving aircraft are delayed or conveyor belts break down, baggage handlers and TSA staff might not have enough time to do their work. So bags languish on loading piers.

The time crunch can be tough on handlers. Southwest jets, for instance, might spend only 25 minutes on the ground between flights, said Chris Johnson, station manager in Los Angeles. Crews get five to 10 minutes to unload and 10 to 15 minutes to load scores of bags.

“Misrouting: “You’ve got human error involved,” said Mark Nelson, president of Local 513 of the Transport Workers Union of America, which represents baggage handlers in Texas. “Sometimes you go too fast and make a mistake.”

Routers rely on three-letter airport codes, many of which are similar. Glancing at a bag tag, it’s easy to mistake PHX (Phoenix) for PDX (Portland, Ore.), or LAS (Las Vegas) for LAX (Los Angeles). Workers also might misread the flight number or, on interline transfers, the other airline’s code.

Technology isn’t always perfect, either. Error rates in the scanning of bar codes can reach 10 percent or more, said Catherine Mayer, SITA’s vice president of airport services.

At American Airlines in Los Angeles, automatic scanners typically fail to read tags on about 800 of 14,000 bags processed each shift, said managing director Mark Mitchell, who oversees American’s day-to-day operations at the airport.

“Security delays: Mitchell blamed TSA security staff backups for one-fifth of American’s mishandled luggage at L.A., where passengers carry their bags from check-in counters to screening stations. That figure might be lower, he said, in terminals where bags are moved by conveyor belt.

TSA spokesman Nico Melendez acknowledged that his agency was sometimes at fault, especially during high traffic. But he added, “Baggage delays did not begin with the advent of the TSA.”

In fact, the U.S. airline industry’s worst year for mishandled baggage was 1989, more than a decade before TSA took over screening at airports, says the Department of Transportation.

“Forwarded bags: Your luggage might arrive at the airport before you do if you’re bumped from a flight and your bags get on anyway. In bad weather situations, airlines might divide customers from canceled flights among several other flights while sending their luggage on ahead, Mitchell said.

“Switches and theft: Someone might accidentally grab your bag from the carousel; it’s usually returned soon after, but not always.

These days it’s rare to see staff matching up bags and their owners as they leave the claim area. Airlines say it’s not worth the cost to monitor the exits because so few bags disappear that way.

Toni Wilson, Southwest’s assistant station manager at L.A., said it happens “not even once a day” at Los Angeles International; American’s Mitchell said it occurs maybe once every other day.

Reports of thefts in baggage claim aren’t common. As of Oct. 16, L.A. had logged 11 such reports this year, said James Butts, deputy executive director in charge of law enforcement for Los Angeles World Airports; in 2005, it logged five.

It’s hard to say just how often luggage is delayed or lost. By law the largest U.S. airlines must report to the DOT the total number of passengers’ mishandled-baggage reports for domestic flights each month. But they aren’t required to break down that total into delayed, damaged, lost and pilfered bags.

The DOT reported that the 19 biggest U.S. airlines last year received, on average, six reports of mishandled bags per 1,000 passengers. The rate for August, when new security rules caused more fliers to check bags, was about eight per 1,000 – the highest in 20 months.

As for luggage that is never recovered, it’s a tiny percentage, SITA says. Worldwide, about one passenger in 2,000 lost a bag, representing about 4 percent of delayed-bag reports processed last year through SITA’s WorldTracer software.

Still, the losses on U.S. airlines alone are enough to support what Marshall of the Unclaimed Baggage Center calls “a good solid business in a small town.”