[stevicus]

I took a look at the report in the link you posted. The 2.81 per 1000 figure was only for the month of September, 2011. The next table showed the same data for the year starting from January, 2011 up to and including September, 2011. The figure for that nine-month period is slightly higher, at 3.49 per 1000 passengers (nearly 1.5 million pieces of mishandled luggage),

What might be more helpful is if they showed this data and compared it with the actual number of people who checked their baggage, since a lot of passengers just do carry-on and don't bother to check their baggage anymore. Or, it might even be more telling if they just compared the actual number of checked bags versus reports of mishandled bags.

Since they started charging fees for baggage, I take that as an indication that handling baggage is something that's either too much trouble for the airlines or that it's no longer cost-effective to handle both passengers and baggage at the same time. The fees compel people to cram as much into their carry-on baggage as possible, which just causes longer lines at the security checkpoints, not to mention the extra time it takes for boarding and deplaning mainly because of all this carry-on baggage.