Baggage handling: How 500 bags a day go missing from Dublin Airport

Airlines always lost bags. The problem is largely human, a wake-up call for an industry increasingly dependent on tech, writes Eoghan Corry

Lost bags, (or “mishandled” bags as they are called in the industry) are expensive. Before Covid, IATA estimated they cost the airline industry $2.1bn a year. File picture: Colin Keegan, Collins Dublin

Air travel comes with added anxiety these days. No surprise then, that one of the oldest and most enduring travails of the traveller has just got worse: the wait at the end of the journey to see if your bag will clatter down the carousel and join you at your destination.

On a normal day in Dublin, over the past 10 years, up to 50 bags might be expected to fail to meet their owners at arrivals. Nowadays, the missing list reaches 500 a day and sometimes more, over 1,000 on several days in recent weeks.