Osaka: Kansai Airport proud to have never lost single piece of luggage (2024)

https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/features/japan-focus/20241228-229891/

by thunderbong • 5 months ago

221 105 5 months ago

japannews.yomiuri.co.jp

aapoalas2• 5 months ago

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 :)

kylecazar• 5 months ago

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

aapoalas2• 5 months ago

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

dathinab2• 5 months ago

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. ).

dhosek• 5 months ago

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

alex_suzuki• 5 months ago

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

recursive• 5 months ago

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

EuanReid• 5 months ago

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.

ghaff7• 5 months ago

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.

bombcar4• 5 months ago

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.

moufestaphio2• 5 months ago

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.

ghaff7• 5 months ago

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.

fsckboy• 5 months ago

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

arvindkumarc• 5 months ago

How is this stat even useful?

amiga386• 5 months ago

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/

succo• 5 months ago

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

Barbing• 5 months ago

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...

sparkie• 5 months ago

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.

ghaff7• 5 months ago

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.

lilytweed• 5 months ago

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.

aix13• 5 months ago

Weird things do happen. I was once looking out of an airplane window waiting for takeoff when I saw my suitcase getting offloaded from the hold and taken back to the terminal. Spoke to the crew, who spoke to ground staff, who brought the bag back.

Not the slightest idea what it was all about... (I'm guessing some sort of mix-up in which they thought I'd failed to board?)

lysace• 5 months ago

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.

adrian_b2• 5 months ago

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.

jakub_g• 5 months ago

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.

afavour2• 5 months ago

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.

ToucanLoucan3• 5 months ago

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.

gmd633• 5 months ago

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.

psadauskas2• 5 months ago

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".

bakies2• 5 months ago

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

mc322• 5 months ago

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.

nielsbot2• 5 months ago

financial and time constraints

I read this as "profit focus"

PostOnce2• 5 months ago

Very often the financial constraints are merely a euphemism for greed.

m3kw9• 5 months ago

real world user interface done right

Freedom2• 5 months ago

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

pizzathyme• 5 months ago

As an American who has lived in Japan and traveled around Asia, Europe, and South America, Japan's attention to detail is almost superhuman. From how bathroom lines are managed, packages are wrapped, garden moss is curated, dishes are plated, everything is almost perfect. It's like the level of service in Michelin restaurants, applied down to the lowliest of jobs.

There's nitpicks people will find with a statement like this but I've never found anything like it.

PostOnce2• 5 months ago

The entire US economy right now is propped up by the idea that we can pay ZERO attention to detail and have the AI do all the work, isn't it?

adrian_b2• 5 months ago

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.

apetresc• 5 months ago

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

fusslo2• 5 months ago

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.

ummonk2• 5 months ago

This is reminding me of the story of a Japanese airport doing a full security sweep because one of the airport restaurants had misplaced a kitchen knife.

aix13• 5 months ago

I'm only superficially familiar with the Japanese culture, but it somehow feels suprising that they didn't leave an apologetic note explaining that they were forced to destroy the lock and why.

rectang3• 5 months ago

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.

kseniamorph• 5 months ago

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.

renecito• 5 months ago

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

hknceykbx• 5 months ago

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

jopython• 5 months ago

High Trust Society!

Tor3• 5 months ago

One of my (two) suitcases was lost once when I flew to Japan. But I didn't have to find out by waiting forever at the conveyor belt until I realized that.

Instead, when I left the airplane a person was there waiting for me, just outside the door, and explained to me that unfortunately one of my suitcases was missing. It was now in Shanghai instead of Japan. The person then walked with me to the immigration area, and then met up with me in the baggage hall afterwards, and took me to the right place to fill out the missing luggage papers, and explaining that if I could give the address of my place to stay in Kanji it would be easier. And the suitcase did arrive at my door the next day.

And, of course, in the baggage area itself.. a person from the airline was standing in front of where the bags come out and preventing them from banging into the side when they came down the slide.

Needless to say, but I've been travelling all over the world for decades and something like the above I've never seen anywhere else. Missed luggage uncountable number of times, many destroyed and damaged suitcases of course.. but that's elsewhere.

Neywiny• 5 months ago

I'm pretty sure the last time I flew spirit I saw a handler protecting the suitcases. Either that or another airline, but even then Southwest or United, nothing fancy.

ranger_danger• 5 months ago

Japan has a long history of simply not reporting things (including serious crimes) because it makes their stats look bad.

Go read some of the japan-related subreddits and they are all full of stories of people getting harassed/assaulted/etc. (or worse) and the police just absolutely refuse to do anything about it. Getting them to file a report for any reason is extremely difficult.

And if someone does end up getting arrested for any reason, the entire judicial system is unfair and unnecessarily cruel and inhumane. They can hold you for up to 23 days with zero reason and zero outside contact. Many innocent people's lives have been completely ruined due to this for no good reason. They viciously interrogate people trying to demand confessions no matter how innocent you might seem, because again, it makes their conviction numbers look good.

Don't get me wrong, I've been to Japan many times and I thoroughly enjoy all the good things about it, but just like every country, there are a number of quite bad things as well.

Osaka: Kansai Airport proud to have never lost single piece of luggage (2024)

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