101–110 of 141 posts
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Did you read the sentence right after that one? "Around 25m of them (5.7 per 1k bags checked) end up lost or misdirected. The 0.03% of bags that are still not reunited with their owners after 90 days are sold by the airline." 0.03% of 25m, and it's only after 90 days.
I'm pretty sure that's a mistake. 1.3M are never claimed according to the figures early on, that's 0.0 0 3% of the total figure.
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Not a lot of money in stolen baggage. But using stolen baggage as an in to socially engineer someone into sending you Target gift cards? That seems like the kind of scam that might happen.
You get the average bag value from every bag though (on average!), you socially engineer someone into sending you more than that in Target gift cards some tiny fraction of the time. And in this scenario you have to know about their lost baggage anyway. I think if you somehow have access to the lost baggage at a given airport, theft is going to me profitable than scamming. Aaanyway!
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Did you read the sentence right after that one? "Around 25m of them (5.7 per 1k bags checked) end up lost or misdirected. The 0.03% of bags that are still not reunited with their owners after 90 days are sold by the airline." 0.03% of 25m, and it's only after 90 days.
I'm pretty sure that's a mistake. 1.3M are never claimed according to the figures early on, that's 0.0 0 3% of the total figure.
> Some say the store has an ethical duty to reunite people with their lost luggage — especially highly personal items, like jewelry inscribed with names and dates, or electronics with identifiable information. But historically, the store has maintained it has a business to run. I’m quite surprised by the opposition here, I’d assume that the high sentimental value could be converted in a much higher price than its off…
The PR nightmare from ransoming luggage back to the rightful owner would be catastrophic. Airlines would immediately stop working with this company.
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I absolutely get that. But this private company is not the TSA, either.
Right, but in order to lose your bag, it has to first pass through the TSA. I doubt a bag would make it all the way Unclaimed Baggage with the locks intact.
This company can't sell bag contents without gaining entry into the bag.
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Will an air tag help the airline to identify you? That would be rather bad in a privacy sense. I don't think it is easy for you to call the airline and say my bag is in this building etc please give it back to me. my point is that the airline needs to be able to contact you.
Actually, yes -- if you enabled Lost Mode. I have some experience with this situation directly. On the way home from a trip in December, I dropped an AirTag in the pocket my 3-year-old's stroller and forgot to attach it securely before I gate checked the stroller. I got the stroller back when we arrived but realized a day later that the AirTag slipped out. I could see it at the AirPort but an ~hour of time trying to…
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I was at a convention once listening to an FBI agent talk about contacting companies that had been hacked. They would not reply to emails or even open letters labeled "FBI". The likelihood of a scam was just too high. So they asked the room what it would take for us to believe that an unsolicited communication came from the real FBI. In short, the room wanted Mulder and Scully at the front door, in suits, with badges…
Yep, try running a marketing contest sometime and then trying to notify people by phone or email that they have won the grand prize.
People report their missing luggage, definitionally air carriers know the passengers. Without explicit consent to sell the luggage why is this allowed? If an airline loses my luggage, and "compensates" me, they still have no right to sell it. It could include all kinds of personal information, or things of personal value, etc.
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> There's the rub: luggage ends up at UnclaimedBaggage after the airline has exhausted all other avenues to try and find the owner. > There are no contactable owners, so the ethical dilemna solves itself. Er, that's a very... convenient excuse for absolving people of ethical responsibility. Geez, there's no contact info on it, how could I possibly reunite it with its owner?? It's not like we have any clue who's lost…
I don't think it's worth cherry picking what they said. They also said that it ends up there once the airline has exhausted all avenues for contacting them. Once an airline does that and a large period of time has passed, what else can they do? Surely, there is a shared level of responsibility for the owner of the lost bags to at the very least to try retrieve them. It's not hard for anyone to contact an airline or a…
I would assume that this is the case for a non-zero amount of the bags sold. The article talks abot specific items where the owner was known but the item was not returned.
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Do companies have a true incentive to do the work? Or can they provide limited token compensation minus the sale of the lost luggage, and come out ahead vs doing a good job at not losing luggage and returning it when found? If government/contracts limits compensation liability, then cut costs as much as possible and bring in some revenue selling luggage?
> Do companies have a true incentive to do the work? The article states "When they can’t find your bag, they are liable to compensate you for your loss (up to $3,500 for domestic flights and $1,780 for international)."
Thus allowing a company to buy "lost" bags directly decreases the incentive the airlines have to find the owner of the bag.