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        Airline luggage losses just excess baggage

By Mark Dunn and Holly Ife

THE Australian airline industry loses up to 200,000 passenger bags a year - some of which end up being donated to charities when their owners cannot be found.


Qantas loses about 150,000 bags a year and Jetstar and Virgin Blue misplace about 12,000 and 25,000 respectively.


While Qantas says 92 per cent of bags lost domestically are returned to their owners within 48 hours, an untold number are held at airports for up to three months before being handed to charities.

Travel insurers said certain overseas airports, including New York's JFK and Heathrow, were hot spots for losing bags.


World Nomads travel insurance spokesman Graham Kingaby said extra security screening at major airports had also had an impact.


Mr Kingaby said while most bags were recovered, insurance companies paid out millions of dollars in replacing bags that were never returned or those delayed long enough to force passengers to buy replacement clothes and bathroom products.


"You can mount up expenses pretty quickly in a country where you end up in the same clothes and you haven't got any underwear," he said.


Although bar codes and automated baggage systems had improved the situation, the "unofficial airport tax" - bags or contents being stolen by baggage handlers - was still a concern at some international airports, he said.


Jetstar spokesman Simon Westaway said his company had one of the lowest loss rates.


"Obviously we don't want any bags misplaced but our rate runs to one in 1000 for domestic operations and about 4.5 per 1000 for international," Mr Westaway said.


Virgin Blue said it needed to look for about two bags for every 1000 flyers.


"We are very diligent in hunting down any temporarily wayward baggage and reuniting bags and owners," spokeswoman Heather Jeffery said.


"There are many reasons bags can go missing: late check-in, no names on luggage, people collecting identical bags from carousels, or simply due to network disruptions, which do occur from time to time."