Surfboards are not ordinary suitcases. BoardBagFees keeps official baggage-performance data separate from community reports, then shows both so travelers can understand the broader airline record and what surfers actually experienced.
For U.S. reporting carriers, we use the Department of Transportation Air Travel Consumer Report where comparable mishandled-baggage data is available. It covers checked baggage generally, not surfboards specifically.
U.S. DOT reports ↗SITA publishes global baggage-mishandling benchmarks and IATA sets baggage-tracking standards. These are valuable international context, but they are not a public airline-by-airline surfboard ranking, so we do not pretend they are.
SITA Baggage IT Insights ↗Our traveler form now records whether a board or bag arrived undamaged, damaged, broken, delayed or lost, plus optional claim outcomes. Reports are moderated before they affect community statistics.
Share your board-bag outcome →SITA's 2026 industry report says 24 million bags were mishandled in 2025, transfers accounted for 39% of mishandling cases, and the industry-wide cost was about $6.3 billion. IATA's baggage-tracking page cites 6.3 mishandled bags per 1,000 passengers and 33.4 million mishandled bags for 2024.
Only approved traveler reports with a board/bag outcome are counted. “Issue” means minor damage, significant damage, a broken/unusable board, delayed baggage or lost baggage. “No issue” is counted separately. We show the number of reports alongside the result because a small sample should never look more certain than it is. The community data is anecdotal and is not statistically adjusted for passenger volume, airport, route, aircraft or ground handler.
The UK Civil Aviation Authority publishes passenger complaint data and guidance for lost, delayed and damaged baggage. We use these sources as context and for future data expansion, but we do not convert broad complaint totals into airline handling scores unless the underlying dataset is directly comparable. UK CAA passenger complaints ↗