Japan’s Kansai Airport World Record—No Luggage Lost In 30 Years

It’s normal for airlines to lose some of our bags in transit—about 7.6 pieces per every 1,000 travelers on average. One airport, though—Japan’s Kansai airport—has not lost anyone’s bags in the last 30 years, and the airport handled 10 million bags in 2023 alone.

Some bags are lost through human error—they are not put on the airplane at the departure airport or it’s usually because there are errors at connecting airports. Bags are normally tagged and given a barcode at check-in, and sometimes when the bags are on the conveyor to be sent to the gates, the barcodes are unreadable by the machines and so they have to be checked by staff; scanned and sorted manually. This can lead to human errors or in the worst cases, there is simply not enough time to get these bags to the gates to the be boarded in time, particularly if—as during and after the pandemic—there were simply not enough staff to cope.

Ground handlers then place the bag that has not traveled with its owners on the quickest route to get to the end destination—sometimes this could be with another airline traveling through a third destination, where it could also get mislaid. Clearly, the more connections a traveler makes, the more connections their luggage must make too, opening up the possibility of lost luggage. Plus, barcodes are not universal, but specific to an airline, to allow for data protection, but it could also lead to error.

At Kansai, one of two airports that service Japan’s third-largest city, Osaka, this lack of lost luggage is down to the bags being checked multiple times, reports Nikkei Asia. For a start, staff check consistently to make sure the number of bags on arrival matches the number recorded on departure, and then search to find the item (in the plane’s cargo hold, the parking apron and the sorting room).

What’s more, baggage handlers aim to get luggage onto the conveyors in the baggage claim area within 15 minutes after an airplane touches down at Kansai, and doesn’t place damage-prone items on the conveyor belts but hands things like musical instruments to the passengers directly.

Unsurprisingly, Skytrax, the U.K. aviation research company named Kansai airport as the best airport for baggage delivery in its World Airport Awards 2024—even more unsurprisingly, it has won the award eight times.

Business Insider reports on how these statistics measure up to those on lost luggage in the U.S. where the Bureau of Transportation Statistics claims that 0.58% of all luggage was mishandled in 2023 (that figure rose to 0.75% in the busiest month of July 2023)—on average, each year, lost luggage on domestic flights in the U.S. equates to 3 million bags.

Interestingly, this is not the only record that Kansai airport holds. According to NASA, it is the world’s first ocean, offshore airport, built in Osaka bay on landfill in 1994 and because of that, it sinks 2-4 cm each year. In total, due to the weight of the construction material, the airport has actually sunk more than 8 metres since the early 90s. At the time of building, it was also the world’s longest airport and presumably unrelatedly, it also came up in a 2023 study on the world’s busiest airports as having some of the most expensive airport food with the price of a main dish costing on average $34.02.

However, World Expo, the international gathering of world leaders to solve international issues (which started life as the Great Exhibition in 1851 in London) is being held in Osaka in 347 days, in April 2025 with a focus on designing a society for the future. It remains to be seen if Kansai can keep up its record when it’s expected to welcome 37.33 million passengers in 2025—a staggering increase on the 13.99 million travelers passing through Kansai airport in 2023.