American Airlines Loses Bags on 73% of Flights, Ranks as Worst US Carrier for Mishandled Baggage

New updates from the Air Travel Consumer Report reveal a very concerning trend for popular commercial airlines — especially American Airlines. The Fort Worth, Texas-based airline had mishandled more luggage than any other airline over the past decade.

Fumbling The Bag Again

Between 2021 and 2024, the Air Travel Consumer Report finds American Airlines has ranked the highest of 15 airlines in terms of the likelihood of mishandled luggage. In the past three years, the airline was found to have lost or misplaced 1.7 million pieces of luggage out of more than 200 million. This means out of every 1,000 pieces of luggage that go through American Airlines' systems, nearly nine of them aren't returned to their owners as expected.

Even air travel analytics company Cirium revealed some disturbing figures just for the past month of July. During this month, American Airlines curated 108,609 flights. Among these flights, 78,757 bags were lost. This means the airline lost 73% as many bags as there were flights under its watch.

Among these July flights, 6,680,537 bags total were enplaned. That gives an alarming 1.18% probability of American Airlines losing a particular bag, with at least one bag of every 100 guaranteed to be lost or misplaced. The Air Travel Consumer Report ranks the airline 15th out of 15 in terms of mishandled baggage. 

The report finds Allegiant Air the best when it comes to mishandled baggage. While the low-cost airline only mishandled 1,021 out of the 644,877 bags under its watch in July, that equates to only a 0.16% mishandling rate. Southwest Airlines had a very impressive showing in the report, as while the airline had managed twice as many bags as American, it had only a mishandling rate of 0.47%.

One more noteworthy finding is how two of American Airlines' regional affiliates fared. Envoy Air and PSA Airlines ranked 12th and 14th, respectively. Envoy had a mishandling rate of 0.96%, while PSA's was 1.10%.
 

American Airlines has also ranked last in on-time arrivals, with only 60.2% of flights arriving on time among all U.S. airports. Hawaiian Airlines has been ranked first with 84.1% of flights arriving on time.

American Airlines Responds

In June, American Airlines Chief Operating Officer David Seymour told the Wall Street Journal that the airline was aware of the ongoing baggage problems and the airline has been looking to mitigate them.

“If we get [travelers] there and the bag doesn’t make it, [there’s a] huge drop in their perception of the service or the value they got from buying a ticket on American,” said Seymour.

However, Seymour also told employees in 2022 that the airline was in no hurry to introduce luggage-tracking technology that could otherwise be beneficial to reducing the number of lost bags. The reported reason given was that many other partner airlines still haven't made the move either, and will only plan to adopt the technology once other airlines do. 

An American Airlines spokesperson sent an email to SFGate explaining that while improvements haven't happened overnight, February 2024 saw Americans experience a 25% improvement year-over-year in mishandled baggage, and that was the airline's best baggage report since 2017.
 

Among the changes the airlines made included changes to the bagging system. Luggage with shorter connections has been strategically placed at the front to ensure travelers got their bags off their flights right away. Each piece of luggage would get a certain tag to indicate the luggage's proper destination.

The spokesperson also went on to express how a new routing system has encouraged employees to be wary of baggage during transit:

“American has been improving the way we care for our customers’ baggage, particularly the way we move bags at our hubs and transfer bags between connecting flights.”
 

Despite these efforts, American Airlines seems to still have a ways to go to beat the likes of Delta and United Airlines.