New ‘Luggage Losers’ site scolds airlines for lost baggage: ‘Avoid flying with them’

Revenge is taking off.

A traveler created a whole website to expose an airline after they reportedly lost his girlfriend’s luggage.

Rather than contacting the airline and expressing his frustrations directly to them in an email, entrepreneur Pieter Levels created “Luggage Losers.

The site is “a live ranking of airlines by how much luggage they are losing right now,” created with a singular purpose: “So you can avoid flying with them (and hopefully they can improve).”

The Spanish airline Vueling lost his girlfriend’s suitcase on a trip from Lisbon to Barcelona, according to Levels, and then sent the suitcase to Austin, where the couple was continuing their trip.

According to his post on X, the suitcase had arrived in both Barcelona and Austin, but they were unable to retrieve it.

“It’s now on a trip to random spots around the world without coming back to us while getting gaslit by useless Vueling staff!” Levels shared on Luggage Losers.

“I realized nobody collects data on how much luggage specific airlines are losing every day to avoid the worst ones,” Levels wrote in the FAQ section on the website. “This helps me (and hopefully you too) to book with airlines that put effort in to not lose luggage or get it back fast to their customers! And rewards great airlines for not losing our luggage.”

According to the Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics, mishandled bags — defined as the number of checked bags that are lost, damaged, delayed or stolen — are reported “by or on behalf of the passenger.”

That only applies to bags that were in the custody of the airline “for its reportable domestic nonstop scheduled passenger flights.”

The DOT’s mishandled-bag data comes from individual reports since US air carriers no longer submit the number of mishandled baggage reports as of 2019, the BTS said.

Because individual airlines don’t collect data on lost luggage, Luggage Losers scours the internet at all hours of the day for people talking about their luggage woes — along with which airlines and airports they flew — and cross references with “actual lost luggage data” to estimate just how much luggage is constantly being lost.

The site also takes into account other aspects, including airline fleet size and airport size differences.

As of Tuesday morning, Iberia Airlines was the “biggest luggage loser” with a one in 10 chance of a suitcase being lost, with Air India and Canadian line WestJet Airlines coming in second and third, respectively. Japan Airlines allegedly lost the least luggage, followed by Lion Air, based in Jakarta, Indonesia, and Azul Brazilian Airlines.

However, it should be taken into account that rankings are dependent on whether online complaints and individual accounts are present and accurate.

A report from earlier this year by shipping site MyBaggage.com pored over data supplied by the DOT that details the total amount of luggage — including wheelchairs and mobility scooters — checked in by airlines between January 2021 through January 2024.

The worst offender was American Airlines, which struggled with 1,750,009 lost-luggage reports — that’s an average of 8.71 disappeared bags per 1,000 that were loaded onto an aircraft.

Second was Envoy Airlines — American’s largest regional carrier, formerly known as American Eagle — and in third place was Republic Airways, which acts as another regional airline for American, as well as Delta and United.