I've only ever flown out of YVR and I have nothing bad to say about AC, so the airport could be a factor!

Welcome to Canada!

Luggage collection is already slow enough. Adding a correlation check would make it even slower. Plus a good number of people immediately lose their luggage slip once their bag is tagged... I wouldn't necessarily trust people having a matching slip anyway because you could just scan and print one... So then you're checking IDs and everyone who has a bag in their name needs to be present at baggage claim instead of splitting up some someone can get the rental car.

That said, I think they did do ID based baggage claim when I went on a cruise... You'd find your bag and wave down an attendant and point. Needed a lot more space and labor.

In some countries, there are. At the customs gate, they'll ask to see your tickets and then check them against the luggage tags.

I usually just bring a backpack small enough to fit under the seat as well. Depending on the trip, that's obviously not always an option.

Both baggage that’s popped open and loose items get put aside at some stage of loading.

A handler looks at it all and puts loose items in the nearest bags respectively and sends it forward to the lost bag crew. That’s pretty much the simplest explanation here.

Also as an intermediate step before gate checking bags, they usually make people take backpacks etc. out of the overhead because they _can_ fit in the under seat area, even if you didn't bring any other carry on items, which also disincentivises packing light - really you want to use a hard carry on that _has_ to go in the overhead to ensure that it goes in the overhead rather than be forced to give up some of your already limited legroom.

You have lived a very sheltered life my friend.

So there is this thing that "other" people have to do when they need to get somewhere. Its like when you give your friends a ride on your plane, but you dont know them and none of you own the plane. Every person pays a bit to fly from point a to point b. Its known as commercial air travel, and it is as horrible as it sounds.

In my experience generally it's a combination of oversold flights and increased seat counts. Seat width and legroom length changes allow more seats to get crammed into the plane. You have more people, but the amount of overhead bin space doesn't change with it. With oversold flights it's very common for nearly all seats to be occupied.

The net result is the overhead bins almost always fill up before everyone has boarded, at which point they start gate checking everyone's carry-on bags. When this has happened to me on major carriers, I have not been charged. It's still annoying. Particularly when I've packed light to fit everything in a carry-on and avoid checked baggage altogether.

If people don't gate check enough bags, the flight gets delayed while people spend 20 minutes trying to fit their 10" wide bag into whatever 6" wide slots they can find, or you get the assholes that start pulling other people's bags down (I've had to stop a few people from doing this to my own bags) to make room for theirs. Finally the bags get gate checked anyways.

The aggressive push to get people to gate check is to prevent that last part, the delays. The airline makes no money on it (at least the non-budget carriers), but they lose money if flights are delayed and cascade into potential cancellations or delayed enough to trigger some kind of credit, reimbursement, or travel insurance coverage.