me wrote:
If you bag went to the wrong city, it gets worse. They will
send it BACK to the city OF ORIGIN. Not the city where it got
misdirected, but where you started.

Wrong. Once the bag is declared unclaimed, it is sent to the baggage dept,
declared misrouted. They enter its tag number into the computer as well a its
current location, and will then plot the "best course" for your luggage to get
to its intended destination.

If your bag was sent from LAX to LHR instead of CDG, when it gets to London,
they will see it should have gone to Paris and will put in on the next flight
from Lodon to Paris. It will not go back to Los Angeles.

Now, if it were sent from LAX to Podunk instead of Paris, it is likely it will
have to fly through LAX to get to Paris from Pudunk if Podunk has only
sertvice from LAX.

or hotel. However, as shocking as this may seem, it's not exactly a
high priority for them. It will come off the plane, and go around
in circles on the belt for about 20-40 minutes first.

Nop. Lost luggage is tagged with a special sticker that baggage handlers
recognize. They do not put it on luggage belt, they bring it to baggage office directly.

Where the luggage will go around and around is when it gets misrouted to a
airport that offers no connecting luggage service and/or is a port of entry
(all luggage goes on belt to go through customs. Then, they must wait for
luggage to be unclaimed before they realise there was a problem.

But at airports that handle connecting luggage, they will look at the tag to
determine whether the bag needs to be claimed at that airport or be put on
some connecting flights. In doing so, they discover it was misrouted, and then
enter its tag in the computer and find the best route to have it get to its
intended destination.

At the time the luggage is found, the handlers at that airport will likely not
have access to the information you provided when you declared the luggage "lost".

For instance, if you fly Airline X from A to B, then airline Y from B to C,
but your luggage ends up on airline Z from B to D, then the "Z" folks at D
will send a message to airline Y advising they have found your luggage. That
message gets automatically added to your lost luggage claim.

Until someone sends a message to your airline advising luggage was found, your
airline only knows that you filed a lost luggage report and they have no clue
where your luggage is.

What this is important is when you are on a multi-leg trip. If you instruct
your airline to deliver your luggage in a different city because you'll be
there the next day, the folks who find your luggage won't know and will only
see the original tag. And it is only once it gets within the airline's
jurisdiction that there is even a small chance it might be intercepted and
luggage tags changed to reflect the new city. This depends on whether
recovered bags get sent to baggage office in each connecting city so their
status can be updated, or whether the baggage flows transparently in the
"system" until it recahes its destination where its tag results in it being
sent to baggage office instead of luggage belt.