An article in today’s New York Times gives the “rest of the story” regarding the impact from the increase in checked luggage. The liquids ban increased the amount of checked luggage by about 25%, which significantly stressed an already strained system. While flight attendents and newspaper editorials have been calling for full bans on carry-on luggage, paying passengers who were forced to check their luggage came away empty-handed from baggage carousel a lot more often in August and September. In August, there was a 33% increase in mishandled baggage over last year. In September, however, the number of mishandled bags exploded — 183,234 more passengers had their bags mishandled than the prior September, a 92% increase!

The article recaps the US Airways baggage meltdown in their Philadelphia hub during Christmas 2004 and walks through the reasons you probably don’t want to check your luggage to or from Philadelphia in the near future. Philadelphia mishandles three-to-four times as many bags as any other US Airways hub. Financial problems that eventually led to bankruptcy has left the hub still short some 40 tractors to pull around baggage carts.

If you think about it, baggage handling hasn’t made any real advancements since the “advanced” luggage system at Denver Interational began eating bags and was dismantled for scrap. Las Vegas’ McCarran International Airport is installing RFID (radio frequency identification) readers, but these “smart” tags cost 20 cents a piece — not very attractive to an industry trying to stay financially solvent by pulling pillows off of planes and charging you extra to book a ticket with a real person.

Recorded in the Rancho Las Palmas Resort & Spa near Palm Springs, CA, we talk about a surprise at the rental car lot and some good and bad TSA experiences. My search for frequent flyer seats to South Africa leads to a discussion about how diversifying or concentrating your “deposits” into frequent travel programs yield different results. The Travel Tech segment reappears with two topics — measuring differences in hotel bandwidth and some travelers’ love affairs with Bose noise-canceling headsets. Here’s a direct link to the podcast file.

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