(Stacker) – Nothing can ruin a vacation faster than getting to your destination, ready to relax and unwind, only to realize none of your stuff made it with you.
By now, the most experienced travelers have mastered the age-old trick of carrying the necessities, including a change of clothes or two, in their carry-ons, just in case they find themselves in this trip-ruining predicament. But there’s another way to avoid dealing with the lost baggage headache—knowing which airlines are most likely to mishandle your luggage and understanding their lost and damaged baggage policies just in case.
To that end, Stacker ranked airlines by which are the most likely to lose, damage, or delay your baggage, based on data from the 2021 Air Travel Consumer Report.
For each operating carrier (the organization that physically handles the flight, not necessarily the organization who sold you the flight, or the marketing carrier), we’ve included data points covering the number of mishandled baggage totals per 1,000 items from October 2021, along with total bags handled.
All of the numbers related to mishandled bags in this article were self-reported by travelers. Check out our guide before your next big trip, and book those tickets (or pack those carry-ons) accordingly.
#10. Skywest Airlines
- Number of mishandled bags per thousand: 4.51
- 11,191 bags lost or damaged out of 2,481,721 total bags handled
SkyWest Airlines is a small regional carrier that operates flights on behalf of larger airlines like Alaska, United, Delta, and American. Its planes currently travel to 250 cities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, carrying customers through smaller cities like Boise, Idaho, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, connecting them to major air travel hubs like Chicago and Dallas-Fort Worth.
Because the airline operates in the place of these larger companies, they don’t have their own unique baggage policy, deferring instead to its partners’ policies. That being said, SkyWest does promise to…
