our-time Grand Slam champion Naomi Osaka faced every travelers worst nightmare on Saturday when United Airlines lost her baggage just hours before she was due to play in the Cincinnati Open.
Taking to social media platform X to voice her frustration, the 26-year-old pro tennis player wrote: “lol @united lost my bags and if I don’t get them tonight or tomorrow I literally can’t play Cinncinati”.
But unlike the experience of many travelers with lost luggage, Osaka had the full attention of United Airlines after her post quickly went viral among her 1.1 million followers on X.
Shortly after sending her post, Osaka already had a personal response from United’s customer service team promising to help find her bags and just two hours later, United said it had located her luggage and would arrange for it to be sent to her.
By Saturday afternoon, Osaka updated her followers to say that she had already received her bags.
Osaka turned professional in 2013 at the age of just 15, but in 2023, the dual Japanese-American citizen decided to take a break from tennis to focus on her mental health.
Now that she is back on the tennis circuit, Osaka is hoping to use the Cincinnati Open as preparation for the US Open, which will take place later this month at Flushing Meadows in Queens, New York City.
In May, the latest month for which statistics are available, United Airlines mishandled nearly 32,000 bags, making it the ninth-worst carrier in the US for losing travelers’ checked luggage.
United handled more than 4.8 million checked bags in May, which means the mishandling rate stands at 0.66 per one hundred checked bags. Thr only major US airline with a worse mishandling rate is American Airlines, where nearly 1 in every 100 bags was mishandled in May.
If you want to stand a better chance of arriving at your destination with your checked luggage then you might want to consider flying with Allegiant where the mishandling rate is just 0.24 per 100 bags, according to Department of Transportation figures.
JetBlue also boasts an impressively low mishandling rate at just 0.31 per 100 bags. And while Delta ha caught flak for its recent operational meltdown, its baggage mishandling rate for May stood at just 0.40 per 100 bags.
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