If baggage fees have had one salutary effect, it’s been to ramp up the pressure on the airlines to provide better service and more transparency on this largely hidden part of their operation. “It’s a key part of customer satisfaction,” says Bob Kupbens, Delta’s vice president of e-commerce. Indeed, Delta had one of the worst records among major airlines for baggage handling in 2007; by 2011, the company had cut its lost-bag tally by 47 percent, rising to the second-best spot among the majors after JetBlue, which flies far fewer passengers and routes. Delta also launched a new smartphone app this year that lets passengers track their bags at every stage of the journey.

In truth, a modern baggage operation is a mashup of high-tech innovation and old-fashioned grunt work. Nowhere is this more critical than in the task of transferring bags from one flight to another—which is where most bag snafus occur. Atlanta, the ultimate fortress hub for Delta, has long been the country’s top connecting depot. Of the 100,000-odd checked bags that are handled here by Delta every day, 70,000 are tossed from plane to plane. The bags making the tightest connections are called “hot bags” and have less than 60 minutes to transit the tarmac. These make the “tail to tail” trip ferried in carts by drivers relying on wireless tablets that direct them to specific flights and automatically update them when gates or departure times change.

One of these drivers, Dexter Greene, has a typically brutal schedule the morning I visit: In one 31-minute shift, he must fetch 20 bags from an incoming flight from Jacksonville and shuttle them to seven other planes in two different terminals. The less urgent bags are trucked by another driver to the cavernous luggage depot, where they’re either sent up chutes to the carousel at baggage claim or, for those on long layovers, land in a holding area until they’re ready to reenter the system.

And while it might seem logical to assume your bag is most at risk in a tight transfer, more leisurely layovers have a downside too, since luggage can be left in the open in intense heat or in the rain. Don’t check your bags too far in advance, cautions Don Harris, senior director of ground operations for Southwest Airlines, which carries more luggage per person than its rivals due to its generous two-bags-free policy. “If bags are coming in for a flight that departs in three hours, we might have to set them aside. It could become a case of out of sight, out of mind.”

Judging from complaints received by Condé Nast Traveler’s Ombudsman, bags can be subjected to all manner of abuse. One flier reported that when he retrieved his “indestructible” suitcase from the carousel, it was soaked in oil and had been punctured, with two large holes clear through the bag. “It looked like it had been impaled on a forklift,” he wrote. One reader who flew to Paris recalled that when she collected her luggage at Charles de Gaulle Airport, “every article inside was soaking wet” and colors had run and destroyed nearly $1,000 worth of recent purchases. (The problem had begun when the bags were left beside the plane during loading in a heavy downpour.) She spent several days in a fruitless attempt to get the airline’s Paris office to reimburse her. “My entire trip was spoiled,” she said, with her sole souvenir a bag of smelly and discolored togs.

The industry responds that such anecdotal tales, while colorful, don’t fairly represent the progress it has made in getting bags to their destination on time and intact. “The airlines had their best-ever year for baggage handling” in 2011, says Francesco Volante, CEO of airline data provider SITA, which issues annual worldwide baggage reports. He points out that the rate of mishandled bags has been cut in half worldwide in the last five years.

Lost in Translation

Compared with those in the United States, the baggage-handling records of some of the world’s largest foreign airports and carriers can appear dismal. About five years ago, the airline trade group IATA became concerned that the rate of mishandled bags was rising faster than the increase in passengers, and it initiated a series of audits by teams of baggage experts who would swoop in and suggest fixes. At sprawling Charles de Gaulle, for example, transferring bags is a daunting task—the airport requires fully 62 miles of track to carry the luggage of the more than 165,000 fliers who pass through the airport each day. Among the chronic problems: Bags were arriving at the plane too close to flight time, and some were inexplicably being flagged as “unknown” by the automated handling system, which spit them out for manual reading—causing more delays. In the two years since IATA’s intervention, the airport has reduced its lost-bag rate by 40 percent.