My least favourite airline has gotten better over the years. But legacy inefficiency from the days of it being a “National airline”, government subsidized, are still evident.

For example, when they lost a piece of luggage recently, the system of tracking that lost bag is still astonishingly bad. Instead of marking it with a special “priority tag” and returning it to the disgruntled customer with the care of a UPS parcel, Air Canada employees hardly know any better than I do where it is.

Instead of a modern tracking system, this is what they use:

They gave me a web page for tracking my bag. But shorthand jargon used decades ago makes the site unintelligible to customers. It was not updated anyway. And was incorrect:

A phone call to their Lost luggage department is routed, as you might expect, to a call centre in India. The fellows there are sincere, hard working, polite — but they have no idea where lost luggage is located. How could they? There is no tracking system. At least 4 Air Canada luggage employees in North America admitted the call centre is only for letting customers blow off steam, not for actually finding bags.

Different Air Canada employees I talked to on the ground in North America tried to help. But notes they add to clarify when I will be in different cities, when departing, etc. seem to be lost by the next agent checking the file.

My advice is to avoid Air Canada, if you can. Other airlines could not possibly do a worse job tracking lost luggage.

After about 12 days I found my own bag by looking in the office at my home airport, Calgary, and visually identifying it myself.

It had been opened, a can of instant coffee exploded. And (I think) an electric razor was missing.

There was no accurate story given me as to what had happened to my bag. I heard several excuses, but they made no sense to me.

Air Canada still sucks.

==== UPDATE

I filed a formal complaint with Air Canada on this. Here is the template response you get after submitting online:

Thank you for contacting us. This is an “auto-response” which confirms we have received your message. Our current processing time is 15 business days for general customer concerns and 30 business days for baggage-related issues. There is no need to re-submit your information, we will do our best to get back to you as soon as we can.

The reference number for your question is ‘080301-000042’.

Ah, 30 business days. Six weeks.

Air Canada is REALLY concerned about my baggage complaint, aren’t they?