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> In early December, a 35-year-old passenger from Tanzania was impressed to see that all the handles of the suitcases on the conveyor belt in the baggage claim area were facing the passengers.

> After the luggage is unloaded and collected in the cargo handling area upon arrival at the airport, ground support personnel manually align the handles of the bags and place them on the conveyor belt.

That's a level of attention to detail that we should be striving for in everything we build.

I think it also highlights something: better things are possible.

Zero lost suitcases doesn't require magic to achieve. It just requires enough workers or enough time to make sure each worker is able to do their job successfully. Unfortunately financial and time constraints mean that very often there aren't enough workers or enough time, and some passengers suffer.

Also requires a culture of respect for the people who are handling baggage - an important thing lacking in parts of society in the US, where working fast food is used as a pejorative.

The culture bit is the most important. You could add 100x the current headcount at all American airports and because the workers simply don't give a shit about doing good work, because they're treating it as a 9 to 5, where they have to go and suffer through a meaningless 8 hours, or worse, they treat it like their own personal access to other people's stuff to loot at will.

The TSA is security theater, a vast majority of American jobs seem to be competence theater. You only ever tend to see care and craft in small business and actual crafts. It's so rare that it's incredibly refreshing to find anyone in any business that bothers to do good work and take care of the small things.

It's not about respecting the baggage handlers. It's about a culture where you respect yourself such that you are obliged to do the best work you can, whether it's baggage handling, being a CEO, or flipping burgers. Self respect and respect for the job far outweigh any notion of employers or other citizens respecting baggage handlers. They have sophisticated notions of status and face and place in society that are sadly absent in American culture.

You could take the Kansai airport baggage handler team and drop them into any airline in the world, and they'd perform to the same high standard. Take any halfass United Airline baggage team and drop them at Kansai and they'd be breaking guitars, killing dogs, and all the other usual shenanigans just like back at home, and they wouldn't give a flying rat's behind about how their employer respects them or not. They're there for paychecks. Respect doesn't even enter into consideration.

> You could add 100x the current headcount at all American airports and because the workers simply don't give a shit about doing good work, because they're treating it as a 9 to 5, where they have to go and suffer through a meaningless 8 hours, or worse, they treat it like their own personal access to other people's stuff to loot at will.

This places the blame solely on the workers. Their CEO earns a ludicrous multiple of their wage. They are treated like shit and are expendable. It’s a two way street, treat workers with respect and and you might get some respect from them.

Yep. The reason employees don't care about their work is that caring for their work is not valued. Box checkers and opportunists proliferate as loyal craftsmen get screwed over repeatedly.

> You could take the Kansai airport baggage handler team and drop them into any airline in the world, and they'd perform to the same high standard. Take any halfass United Airline baggage team and drop them at Kansai and they'd be breaking guitars, killing dogs, and all the other usual shenanigans just like back at home, and they wouldn't give a flying rat's behind about how their employer respects them or not. They're there for paychecks. Respect doesn't even enter into consideration.

The hypothetical of dropping one baggage team into another airport might be true in an immediate timeframe but it doesn't address the core issue - each team was formed in a completely different society, one values celebrity and quick-buck scamming, one values planting trees that cast shade long after you're dead. Pretending like the influential people who steer the most economic activity aren't to blame at all for that difference in culture is insane, especially when we have a felon president who has been pardoning many high profile fraudsters.

Years ago I had an argument with my HR director at the time. I Was hiring for a position and I said I was willing to pay what was approximately 10-15% above market for the position at the time. He said he could get me a dozen prospects at the market rate or even ten percent below, that I was wasting my budget. I said, "I don't want the people who will work for that, the people I'm looking for know they're worth more." He repeated he felt I was over paying. I said, "look at my head count, and compare it to our competitors. I have half the staff but higher metrics in every category. You don't hear about major or long lasting IT problems here. I'm paying 115% but I'm getting 150% and overall spending less."

When your people feel respected and compensated, they work far better.

Them being paid better wouldn't resolve the issue. Updating American culture such that individuals respected themselves, had a sense of shame, operated from a baseline of respect and gratitude for the opportunity to be working in the first place, these things fix the issue. Concurrently, the CEO respecting the workers, the institution, themselves, would result in wages commensurate to their value.

Expecting excellence, putting care and craft into your work, is something that is taught, it doesn't just magically happen.

Paying these same workers more would not noticeably improve outcomes, people would still lose luggage, steal shit, and then have even more money to spend.

The workers and the CEO are products of their culture, and without some sort of specific intervention against the outcomes wrought by those cultural influences, things would continue as before. Serious institutions indoctrinate their members and build a culture oriented around expectations of excellence and care and craft.

Such institutions can't compete in the marketplace we've set up, because it's cheaper to offer shitty service and low product quality, to keep employees expendable, low skill, low paid cogs, and to reward CEOs and management willing to screw over their fellow employees at every opportunity to ensure the number goes up.

That doesn't change unless the culture changes, which would change the regulatory environment, which would allow for things like excellent service and quality to be valued accordingly. America doesn't value excellence, it values "number go up."

I'm interested to hear why you think that better pay wouldn't help the issue. Being comfortable with your living situation and feeling like you're respected in excess of your boss's federal or state legal obligations plays a big role in having the wherewithal to put serious effort into whatever you're doing day to day, and it helps to mitigate the divide between the richest and the poorest among us / bad jokes or insults that originate out of fear of being poor.

> Such institutions can't compete in the marketplace we've set up, because it's cheaper to offer shitty service and low product quality, to keep employees expendable, low skill, low paid cogs, and to reward CEOs and management willing to screw over their fellow employees at every opportunity to ensure the number goes up.

The federal minimum wage has been the same since 2009, but In-N-Out is an example of a company that chooses to avoid blaming the worker or the market or the regulatory environment for all of their business difficulties. They choose to pay well over the California minimum wage, and I don't find it coincidental that I've had better experiences with employees there vs some other fast food locations. Costco has made similar choices with how they treat their employees and they're doing great. No regulation needed, just better leadership.

The CEOs that blame "inevitable" market forces on why they have to treat employees poorly while refusing to look inward will ironically lose out in the market. And at a larger scale, probably the countries too.

It's certainly possible to find people who care about doing a job properly in a western society. Paying a bit more has been suggested on another post as a method of trying to achieve that, but I'd argue that that is necessary but not sufficient. You need to not only pay people a bit more, but also screen them very carefully for the attitude of doing the job properly.

It is a cultural problem. Just paying a bit more won't fix it. By paying a bit more, you might be able to get a larger share of the limited portion of people in the society that care, but you're not changing the people fundamentally, just being more selective.

Sorry, it’s acceptable to mistreat luggage because the CEO’s comp is higher than yours?

They are paid less.... you know there are rich people in japan?

> financial and time constraints

I read this as "profit focus"

Something I noticed when I traveled to Japan was how many workers there were just doing things. Attention to detail is so amazing. Things as simple as guiding people in the sidewalk while construction vehicles exit the site has a person dedicated to it

> financial and time constraints

What a passive way to say executives kept a larger share of profits for themselves, forcing workers to be stressed and do a sub-optimal job.

Its like the news reports that say "an officers weapon was discharged and someone died at the scene", rather than "a cop shot and killed a guy".

> What a passive way to say executives kept a larger share of profits for themselves, forcing workers to be stressed and do a sub-optimal job.

This is a very limited view of why things don't work. The main issue in my experience is whether the company values the outcome and ensures focus on optimizing for it. That can include everything from adequate staffing to comp to training to management focus. (A lot of the last one.)

You can spend a huge amount of money and still get a crappy outcome. US healthcare provides a rich field of examples.

US healthcare is a leader in administration fees (e.g. paying health system executives) compared to other countries around the world. High US healthcare cost isn't because of increased usage, but because of the higher admin fees and higher prescription drug prices. Prices are fixed high because law prevents the government from negotiating prices (o.b.o. Medicare/aid), and those provisions were inserted on behalf of pharmaceutical companies so their executives could make more money.

Paying individual workers more may have some benefits, but I think the key issue is usually overworking and burnout because the incremental cost of adding a whole new employee is way higher than just pressuring workers to do more work in the same time.

Also you need to keep organized crime out of airports. Some percentage of lost luggage is actually stolen luggage. Misrouting is also another large percentage. In the US unclaimed lost luggage ends up in some gigantic warehouse in Alabama.

What percentage? I imagine it is insanely low. The risk to reward ratio of making money off a random bag at the airpot has got to be as low, if not lower than, the actual percentage stolen. One thing I've never been worried about it is organized crime, or anyone really, stealing my bag at an airport.

Oh why even mention time constraints, we all know damn well it's financial. Every corp on the face of the earth is constantly cost-cutting everything to the bone to justify more bonuses and higher executive compensation, while making sure the service or products provided are just barely good enough where people don't stage outright riots.

In the sixties, the C-suite earned 21 times what the line worker did. In 2024 it's almost 300 times. So every single time you're dealing with a product that's been value-engineered to where it barely functions, or service people paid too little and empowered too little to actually help you, or stuck in a long ass line because they won't hire enough people, or stuck talking to some damn robot because people are expensive, it's beyond a safe bet that you have an executive or several to blame.

We should be spreading our cynicism over both management and customers. There is almost no level of service so terrible that people won't buy cheaper airline tickets. Let alone losing luggage, you could dial up the risk of death and people would still buy the cheaper tickets.

We need shame, really, societal shame that we inflict on those who have to take government benefits, perhaps. Flying an airline that's known to treat their employees like shit should cause the people at the cocktail to look at you strange.

(We kind of have something like this in that shopping at Costco is considered "good" but lots of people won't admit they shop at Walmart - I'm sure they'll be bankrupt soon given how many people don't shop there!)

Not sure if this is sarcasm, but Walmart earnings continue to rise. Being embarrassed to shop at Walmart is largely a coastal elite bubble situation.

For a more applicable example of shame, buying "cheap Chinese crap" is usually looked down on by all demographics or alignments.

That was the joke, everyone (at least in the coastal elite) says they don't shop at Walmart, but they exist everywhere.

Same with "cheap Chinese crap" - everyone decries it, but apparently everyone is also buying it.

What I meant is that most people do admit to shopping at Walmart with no embarrassment. Not the same for buying CCC. They still buy it but they know they shouldn't. Shopping at Walmart isn't like that.

There's also something about the collapse in civility. Or... something. If you asked a plane full of passengers if they'd be happy to get their suitcase 5 minutes earlier even though it meant someone else lost theirs a lot of them would say yes.

I think we can lay the blame for this on the wealthy elites, too. When people see someone better off than them greedily destroying society for their own personal gain, they naturally think "well why not me, too?".

I mean, is that a consequence of people being innately, for it's own sake, cheap to a point of farce? Or is that a consequence of fifty years of stagnant wages?

I'm sure it's a healthy blend of both, but IMO, if you want to see this actually change, the first thing to even make it tenable as a possibility is the owning classes need to let some money flow down the hierarchy. Like I'm sure we'll always have our misers, our people who refuse to spend a penny more for anything, but I think the vast majority of the time what drives people to shitty retailers selling crap-quality products is that most people are fucking broke.

> I mean, is that a consequence of people being innately, for it's own sake, cheap to a point of farce?

Yes.

The price-driven market segment will never disappear and is an emergent property of human nature and the dynamics of a marketplace where prices are instantly comparable.

Plane tickets are way more affordable for nearly everyone than they used to be, but price competition is more savage than ever. The marketplace has spoken.

While I agree that concentration of wealth at the top is a major problem, I don't think that shaking loose that wealth will change the price dynamics of the airline industry in the slightest.

Well not every one on the face of this earth as that’s where Kansai airport is located. It happens a lot in America and other places too but not everywhere

I find that the US is the most likely country to have this attention to detail.

real world user interface done right

[flagged]

In the airplane industry, KPIs and beancounting are just a response to a mindbendingly price-driven marketplace — to the extent that consumers need to be protected by regulations from flying in unsafe planes.

I agree that there's an issue about western capitalism, but I don't think it's in the tension between middle management and craftspeople who take pride in their work. I think the problems arise at a higher level, with the modern-day aristocracy of the capitalist ownership class and the slice of the pie that they capture.

Headline's a bit misleading. They've never permanently lost a bag, and well done to them for that, but they've certainly lost them for periods of time. Just eventually found them.

Permanent losses are pretty uncommon in general. Good for them for minimizing but having bags on the next flight or delayed for a couple/three days is way more common. Probably would have to be stolen which is rare, especially in Japan, I assume or end up in some weird location without a scan.

Was flying into Narita once and I had checked luggage in part because I was carrying an award for a Japanese customer. I was sort of given a "we'll get back to you sooner or later." At which point I explained the situation to a supervisor I think and was much fluttering around and got the bag the next day.

Most of the "permanent losses" are because the passenger gives up or doesn't care terribly much - hence all the luggage at the airline outlet stores.

Most airlines do eventually find the bag, and if you kept in touch they'll usually even get it to where you are, even if you've since returned.

I honestly have no idea how those dynamics work. At some point, the airline presumably pays, travel insurance does, or a combination of the two. At some point if it's just a bunch of old travel stuff, I guess I can see a customer shrugging, collecting the money, and dropping the whole thing.

I'm now imagining a situation in which a customer at the point of successfully making an insurance claim to pay for the nice new clothes they've bought themselves is infuriated to receive an email informing them that Kansai airport has found their luggage and will endeavour to deliver it to a hotel anywhere within the world within two days...

The customer has presumably been paid. If they're smart there's nothing or very little in the suitcase that can't just be replaced. The airline/insurance has paid out and just wants the claim to go away.

As a side-note, had a small kitchen fire with smoke damage last year and it was pretty obvious that, even though they were reasonably generous, the insurance adjuster, cleaning people, movers, etc. just wanted the whole process to go away so they could move on. They objected a bit to a few claims but, for the most part, spending $50K was nothing compared to the claims being reopened.

Once the insurance adjuster is satisfied that you're not scamming them, they're often quite flexible and lenient.

I've only ever had luggage delayed once, they gave me a little bag of toiletries and a couple hundred bucks and a few days later delivered the luggage; never demanded the money back.

I've had luggage delayed many times relative to the amount I actually check luggage.

There were a few insurance policy things that my adjuster pushed back on (no code upgrades) and there were a number of things that would have just been silly for me not to pay for when walls were being repaintedd and opened up. There was a fire inspector because of the size of the claim. But it was pretty reasonable overall--although of people wouldn't have had the available cash to do the whole job as it really needed o be done. And, given that a couple of contractors, saved my butt in the middle of the winter, I wasn't going to push back too hard.

yeah, I've seen this being tossed around, but they definitely lost MY BAGS. Eventually I got them, but they were lost for 5 days or so.

And that's not a permanent loss. It may screw up your trip to a greater or lesser degree but I try to build in buffers at least for a shorter delay when I can. I have also had a few multi-day delays--on of which just caught my guided hiking trip with like an hour to spare. And I had already bought a new duffle bag worth of stuff as best I could.

I know it's not permanent. I'm just agreeing with OP that this is misleading.

the article does not discuss what you are saying, do you have an alternative source that tells this true story?

Yes it all comes to the culture. But we need to take into account that Japanese culture for the workers themselves is absolutely horrible. Is all that suffering worth not losing a bunch of luggage or getting a train exactly the minute you expect? Not for me at least. I think it’s better to cope with imperfections like that than to work in a toxic environment where you can’t leave the office until your boss leaves. That same culture is the reason why we don’t hear about successful startups from Japan. God forbid there is a single bug in it. But what’s better - to have a software with a bug and not the cleanest code or not to have it at all? Hardware is another story of course. But my point is that there is both good and bad in any culture. Depends on how you look at it

the airport-as-island design probably helps more than people realize -- single terminal, no inter-terminal baggage transfers, and being purpose-built means the baggage sorter was designed into the infrastructure rather than bolted on later. most major airports lose bags on intra-airport transfers between terminals, not on flights. kansai just... doesn't have that problem by construction.

> doesn't have that problem by construction

Well no, but it does have other significant construction problems! https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/japans-20b-kansai-airport...

>doesn't have that problem by construction.

Thanks, going to borrow your words there for my civil engineering friends.

Except Kansai has two terminals, but it's possible that each terminal's baggage processing is handled independently.

When traveling to Japan, I did not have the slightest problem with lost baggage, either at airports, or with the Japanese services that allow you to send your baggage from one hotel to another, to be able to travel more lightly.

However, at the airport, when flying back home I had an unexpected experience. At my final destination, when I retrieved my checked baggage in the airport, it no longer had the padlock that it had at check in, in Japan.

I assume that this happened because at the airport, after check in, they have cut the padlock, to inspect the baggage. I also assume that the inspection was caused by a big kitchen knife that was in the baggage. The kitchen knife had been bought from a shop from Osaka, and it was well sealed inside the original package closed by the shop, but this would not be seen at an X-ray machine.

There was nothing else in the baggage that could be suspicious. In any case, if they inspected the baggage to check the knife, it was done carefully, and the content of the baggage was in the exact same positions as after packing.

Why would a knife be a problem in a checked bag, even if it hadn't been sealed in the original package?

I've asked TSA people similar questions when they checked my bag. He said that the item was blocking view of what was underneath it.

I'd guess it's not the packaging, but a big piece of steel blocking the xray view.

The x-ray machine aren't 360?

If 360, I wonder does the operator perhaps not trust it?

Applying cost-cutting analysis as an intellectual exercise...

Airline ticket sales are so price driven that for much of the market, losing some percentage of bags won't change purchase decisions.

I wonder if it's possible to identify which bags are from budget customers and for Kansai Airport to cut corners for those, accepting a certain loss percentage and saving money. It may not be:

> In addition to monitoring bags with sensors, employees also patrol the area to check for dropped bags. According to the airport management company, this additional step significantly reduces the risk of lost baggage.

I think you either patrol for all dropped bags or give up the patrols entirely, assuming that bags from first-class and budget passengers end up in the same area.

Visited Kansai recently and a few things stood out. Passport control was fully automated: just scanned and walked through. Security flagged something in my bag and resolved it really fast without slowing down the line. It's a small thing, but it's the kind of operational detail that makes a real difference. My travel experience has never been smoother. Makes me wonder why more airports don't get this right.

My luggage was missing when I landed at KIX.

But it wasn't the airport's fault - my luggage was still in Amsterdam.

Arrived <24 hours later and they delivered it to my hotel in Osaka.

In my experience, that's far and away the most common scenario. Luggage misses a connection, doesn't get on a flight that has ben changed because of weather, or otherwise ends up somewhere it's not supposed to be. Many airline tracking systems are better than they used to be but AirTags or equivalent are not a bad idea.

I once had SAS lose my luggage on a direct flight from Copenhagen to Tokyo Haneda. I was sure that such a thing was impossible, but I learned an important lesson that day.

They lost mine! but they found it and brought it to me 2 days later at my door on the other side of Japan. Mind blowing efficiency

I wonder with which companies they partner for those deliveries. Maybe they went with Japan's biggest courier or well, I'm sure they don't do it in house...

I feel like this is a challenge to me now. I will fly to and from your airport and you will lose my bag.

> Lost baggage is when a passenger’s baggage is lost or goes missing due to an error on the part of the airport.

or at least i don’t want to see the goddamn handle, let me awkwardly turn my suitcase first!

I have very fond memories of Kansai airport. First time I went to Japan I ... Uhh, I didn't have a visa despite going there for exchange.

The Kansai airport immigration office uttered a lot of "oohs" and "eehs", but they came through and in less than 45 minutes my appeal for deportation was accepted and I was granted a 1 year student visa. Always makes me happy when I pass through there :)

You showed up in Japan intending to stay for a year without a visa? Bold strategy :)

Bold strategy :)

I don't think this was their "strategy", but more like a "young people are sometimes clueless and fail to take care of necessary things with enough buffer ahead of time" situations.

And that (student + exchange program + in general eligible for a visa) is why it turned out well. Not sure if it still would do so today. The "cheap yen" tourism boom might have brought in money, but also a lot of annoyance with unpleasant tourists amplified by how modern recommendation algorithms work (you see all the rage bait "a tourist behaved mean" and non "normal tourist is polite and does nothing strange") and various propaganda amplifying this. In general there seem to be a ton of "make cities look way worse wrt. safety and cleanliness and blame it on tourists/immigrants/minorities" videos across most western countries in recent times (not just JP, e.g. London has a lot of such nonsense, it's quite safe, but if you ask ticktock it's a lawless crime zone. ).

> Theft From the Person offences have a crime rate of 8.21 reports per 1,000 people in London, which is 4.69 times the national average. This figure is calculated from 87,224 crime reports logged by Metropolitan Police during the 12-month period ending November 2025.

https://crimerate.co.uk/london

That is more than Chicago.

> In June 2025, there were 631 reported incidents (23.2 per 100,000) – a 49% reduction from the August 2023 peak.

https://counciloncj.org/crime-in-chicago-what-you-need-to-kn...

I may have not properly read the paper that said "This is not a visa, you should apply for a visa using this paper"...

You probably had a CoE (Certificate of Eligibility to Reside in Japan, 在留資格認定証明書). This piece of paper needs to be taken to your local embassy or consulate and be converted to a visa there, which then gets stamped on your passport.

But Japan is working quite differently from other countries here, so you're probably not the first person to be confused, although I don't think any country issues a long-term visa that is not stamped on your passport.

it't not lost until you stop looking for it :D

How is this stat even useful?

It sets a verified lower bound on baggage loss. An achieveable ideal that other airports should aspire to.

Lots of orgs claim to aspire to 5 nines of uptime but can barely manage 2 nines. Kansai airport with an average of about 17 million pax/yr [0] hasn't lost any luggage. Losing one item out of, say, 10 million items a year, would be 7 nines.

[0] https://www.kansai-airports.co.jp/en/business/in-figures/

I once flew with ANA to Tokyo/Haneda in First with a rewards-paid ticket for crazy cheap. When I got there and picked up my luggage there was a tag on it, asking me to go to some specific desk. I did. The luggage was a bit janky, but that happens.

They very seriously apologized for breaking my bag. They asked me how much it had cost. I said "around $40, it was just something cheap". A minute later I was sort of ceremoniously handed an envelope with japanese yen notes worth that much.

In Europe, the airlines have broken my checked baggage about 3 times, in places like Vienna, and those had been reasonably solid suitcases.

Obviously, nobody ever offered a compensation.

There is no wonder that such things happen, because at many airports I have seen how the baggage handlers throw the baggage through the air into the vehicles that carry the baggage to the airplanes, even over a distance of a few meters, instead of depositing it gently into the vehicle. Therefore I never put anything fragile in a checked baggage.