As mentioned in the article, most bags eventually find their way back to the owners, but on a typical business trip, that doesn't matter. A late bag is as useless as one that was never packed and was left at home. That's why pax (me included) never check a bag on a business trip if it contains anything essential to the trip. And that's why overhead bins continue to overflow.
Airline incompetence in this one area has an uncanny way of making the customers (passengers) look very stupid and incompetent, and young business travelers learn very early (and if they don't they'll be fired) that carryons are the only way to avoid having airline luggage-handling incompetence attributed to them.
The solution to this mess lies in a per-piece charge for all checked bags, along with much more strict "penalties" paid by the airlines to the pax for failure to deliver the bag with the pax: Something like $25 or $35 checked bag fee per bag paid by all pax checking bags with a $2,000 or so fee paid to the pax if the bag isn't on the bagbelt 20 minutes or so after arrival.
Maybe "penalties" like those would motivate incompetent airlines to "try a little harder" to deliver each and every bag along with the pax. And if the checked bag fee was made expensive enough, that would discourage people from packing so damn much stuff, making it easier for the rampers and airlines to achieve a 99.9% or higher success ratio.
