Every bag in that ocean of unclaimed luggage we’re seeing on airport floors has a story behind it.

To hear those stories is to understand just how maddening travel has become for many in 2022. Travelers say calls, emails, chats and tweets to airlines about lost bags frequently go unanswered by short-staffed airlines and airports. They hear conflicting information—or nothing—about the bag’s whereabouts.

Efforts to find and retrieve their bags, even when devices like AirTags pinpoint the location, are eating up hours and sometimes days of vacation time. And that doesn’t count the daily shopping trips for clothes until (or if) the bag shows up.

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Kim Harkness tried to reach Aer Lingus at least twice a day, every day when her suitcase failed to arrive in Shannon, Ireland, for a two-week golf vacation in late May. One time the airline answered and the call dropped. Another time an agent told her they had no stranded bags dating to her arrival date. When she asked the first two airlines on her three-leg journey from Austin, Texas, to Ireland, to search her baggage claim number, both turned up nothing.

“I could have tapped somebody on the shoulder on the street and gotten more help,” she says.  

A week into the trip, as her group prepared to fly to Scotland, Ms. Harkness bought a new suitcase. She’s been home since June 11 and the old one’s still missing.

“They don’t write. They don’t call. Feels like nobody cares at all. That’s my new country and western song,” she says. She only heard from the airline after complaining to the U.S. Transportation Department. Aer Lingus didn’t say where the bag was but apologized for “not having met your expectations.” Representatives for the airline didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Luggage outside Terminal 2 at Heathrow Airport in London.

Photo: HENRY NICHOLLS/REUTERS

Airline-bag scanning technology and bag-tracking apps were designed to reduce the number of mishandled bags. But as flight cancellations and delays have piled up during the summer travel surge, bags have too. 

“When you hit a rough patch in your operations, the bags are going to be affected probably even more so than customers,” Delta Chief Executive Ed Bastian

said last week.

He said the airline’s domestic bag operations are doing well. Europe is another story. Airports there, which didn’t receive the government support U.S. airports did when the pandemic decimated travel, are severely short-staffed.

SITA, a Swiss firm that manages baggage-tracking software used by airlines around the world, says the number of mishandled bags between April and June was five times higher than a year ago. The number of reports in June was slightly higher than June 2019 despite air travel not being completely back to prepandemic levels.

Yvonne Heerema, senior luxury travel adviser at the Shameless Tourist travel agency, spent the first two days of a June trip to London stressed about three bags that didn’t show up with her family on a United flight from Newark, N.J. (United said it works hard to reunite costumers with lost bags “as quickly as possible.”) Now she warns clients with coming trips to prepare for that possibility. Her tips include packing one suitcase that has a few of each passengers’ items in it and buying AirTags.

“We have to travel now thinking that our baggage is going to get lost,” says Ms. Heerema, who is based in Austin, Texas.

San Diego investment executive Aditya Pattanaik says he should have known bag trouble was brewing when he checked in for his flight in Amsterdam on July 4. He watched Lufthansa employees, including managers, loading 10 checked bags at a time onto carts instead of the conveyor belt.

The long check-in and security lines at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport forced him to miss the flight and spend $2,000 on a new ticket home and $200 on an airport hotel. But that wasn’t the worst part of his vacation.

Mr. Pattanaik’s North Face duffel bag, filled with what he calls most of his wardrobe, has been missing since he checked it with Lufthansa. It carried the pricey suit and shoes he wore to a friend’s wedding. No one seems to know where it is.

The most help he’s gotten, he says, came from an airport volunteer in San Francisco. Desperate to get information on his bag, Mr. Pattanaik flew from San Diego to San Francisco the day after he returned from Europe, since it was one of the stops on his original itinerary.

“She took my baggage tags and my passport and she went around and asked the folks for Lufthansa,” he says.

Employees searched the system and found his bag never made it out of Amsterdam since he missed the flight. They told him his best bet was to call the airline. He got a recording telling him to fill out an online form.

Travelers waiting to go through the security checkpoint at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport.

Photo: Utrecht/Action Press/ZUMA Press

Mr. Pattanaik checks the bag locator feature on Lufthansa’s website every day, and it flashes the same status update: “Searching for your bag.”

A Lufthansa spokewoman said baggage handling is under “considerable pressure due to lack of personnel.” She apologized for the “inconvenience caused” but said she was unable to comment on individual passenger cases.

Tracking devices like Apple’s AirTag have been billed as the answer to travelers’ lost luggage prayers this summer, but they only help so much.

Nicola Hare, a 41-year-old sales administrator from Glasgow, bought a package of four for her family’s two-week trip to Florida this month.

She was hesitant to spend an extra $100 ahead of an expensive Disney World trip, but the purchase paid off almost immediately. British Airways lost her 7-year-old daughter’s bag. Ms. Hare was able to tell the airline’s representatives at the Orlando airport exactly where it was: 4,331 miles away in Heathrow’s Terminal 3, below a Marks and Spencer shop.

The airline said it would send the bag, which included extra lupus medication Ms. Hare stuffed into her daughter’s suitcase. It didn’t reach Orlando’s airport for four days, a painstaking wait she tracked via the AirTag.

Nicola Hare and her family went 12 days without their daughter’s Marvel suitcase on the family’s two-week vacation to Florida in July, before eventually tracking it down at an airport warehouse.

Photo: Hare Family

And the family didn’t get the bag for another week, even with it in Florida. That meant nonstop back-and-forth with British Airways and its luggage-delivery contractor, promises of delivery and attempted deliveries even though the AirTag showed the bag nowhere near their vacation rental, Ms. Hare says.

On July 13, 12 days after the family’s arrival in Florida, she and her husband drove to the Orlando airport to find the bag. Ms. Hare says she called British Airways one last time and was told they couldn’t give her information on the bag because she wasn’t the passenger—her 7-year-old was.

That day, the exasperated couple drove to the location near the airport pinpointed on the AirTag. It was a warehouse run by a baggage-services contractor filled with lost luggage, strollers and wheelchairs, she says. No one at the airline ever offered the option of going there, she says. British Airways said it is reaching out to Ms. Hare to apologize and resolve the matter. 

She explained her situation, showed identification and got a peek inside. Her husband spotted the Marvel suitcase immediately. 

“They couldn’t have been nicer,” Ms. Hare says. “It was so easy, I thought, ‘I wish I had come earlier.’ ”

Write to Dawn Gilbertson at dawn.gilbertson@wsj.com