the airline bag mishandling rate shot up 74.7% last year. How about the effing airlines attach a tracker to each piece of luggage, and never LOSE anyone's luggage again? Seems cheap and simply, for any company that spends 100s of millions on jumbo jets, right?

are airlines and airports ever going to do a better job of simply putting your suitcase on your plane, and taking it off when you get off, and giving it back to you?

No. 

So, time to get proactive, as the airlines would rather rip you off than treat you right. Why should they, you have to fly, there are no high speed trains across the USA to compete with airlines for getting you thousands of miles away in less time than it takes to drive... if you have to be some where more than 6 hours of driving away, you're likely to fly. Especially for a short time there, and return. 

Airlines mess up people’s rare and precious vacations all the time, simply by losing their luggage. 

So, get a Tile, Chipolo, Pebblebee or AirTag. That’s right: the travel accessory of the moment is the humble luggage tracker.

After airlines and airports laid off staff, there was travel chaos throughout 2022.

 Not enough baggage handlers and exploding numbers of travelers meant bags not being loaded onto planes, bags not being taken fast enough off planes, unattended bags piling up by the thousands in airports – and many of them lost.

The bag mishandling rate was up 74.7% in 2022 compared to the previous year.

Out of every 1,000 bags to take to the skies, 7.6 were lost last year, compared to 4.35 per 1,000 in 2021 and 5.6 per 1,000 in 2019.

Bags for international flights are eight times as likely to be mishandled than those on domestic flights, due to the likelihood of them being transferred (connections account for nearly half the incidents). However, you don’t have to have a complex itinerary for the airline to lose your bag – a whopping 17% of mishandled bags in 2022 were simply never loaded onto the plane in the first place.

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/simple-luggage-trackers-became-hottest-124757590.html?.tsrc=1013