In a small Alabama town called Scottsboro, there is an enormous and very successful business built on the woes of travelers who have lost their luggage. Unclaimed and lost bags end up here, and the treasures inside are sold for fun and profit. You should check out their website, and then you should make it your ambition that your bags never see the inside of this place. Your goal as a traveler should be very simple – to put this business out of business.
Let’s talk about how to avoid losing your luggage, and keep your valuables out of pictures like this:
Tempting fate is never wise, but I’m declaring in front of God, country and American Airlines it’s been almost thirty years since I’ve permanently lost a piece of luggage. For those of you keeping score at home, that dates back to when I was a teenager. My dad and I were returning from a trip to Boston on the now long gone and almost forgotten People’s Express and Logan was completely socked in. We were shifted to a morning flight and my dad declared with absolute certainty that we would never see our bags again. I don’t think it was clairvoyance on his part, but he was absolutely right in the particulars. It was a defining experience in my budding travel life, and not just because there was a handheld Pac Man game and my favorite Panama Jack t-shirt I was never going to see again.
Over the next thirty or so years of domestic travel and now, with at least a smattering of international travel experience finally under my belt, I think I have at least a little something to impart if you’re worried about losing your luggage. Of course, any advice has to be prefaced by the frustrating truth that what mathematicians call The Law of Large Numbers is going to work against you. Travel enough, and you’re going to hit double zero at some point or another, but I’d like to add a few notes to the symphony of advice when it comes to increasing your odds that your luggage will arrive at the same time and place as you. Four basic tips that can start your travels on solid footing.
1. Bag it and tag it. Your first line of defense
How sturdy is your backbone? Can you stand tall in the face of withering criticism, disparaging glances and snide comments? If so, good for you – those sticks and stones will bounce right off you as you tie airline tags around your checked and carry on items at the airport. Who uses these tags to avoid losing luggage?I’ve worked with production techs who keep several dozen blank tags from every conceivable airline in easily accessible compartments of their run bags. They must know something those other travelers don’t and it is this: those tags are useful.
Other travelers will tell you its a waste of time. Counter agents will say, in an effort to speed up check-in, that it doesn’t help, and the business traveler on his way to Dallas for that big meeting will not even attempt to hide his weary eye roll as you keep him from a quick detour to the Cinnabon in Terminal B.
I’m telling you to ignore the naysayers and put those tags on your bags. Even if you have custom tags, use the airline tags also. When your bags are mishandled, accidentally rerouted to Ontario, Canada instead of Ontario, California or just overlooked and tossed by mistake onto the wrong carousel (what, it’s all computerized? Yes, computers are never wrong. Now it’s time for a weary eye roll), you will be doing the overworked and overscheduled baggage handler a huge favor by having… in clear identifiable language the information they need on hand right away – what airline you were on and how to reach you.
You don’t necessarily need to fill out every line on those tags – your name and phone number are the key pieces of information – but it’s the easiest and best thing you can do to help narrow a search. In a sea of lost luggage, they can eliminate everything but your little United tags from your United flight, and then reach you without having to find your number on a claims form.
Why do you want to label your carry on bag? I can tell you from personal experience that there is nothing quite like the sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when you open the overhead bin seventeen rows down from you where you finally found a place to store your carry-on and there’s… nothing there. Chasing down the woman who grabbed your bag by mistake through the concourse of the Salt Lake City airport to reclaim your own bag while also trying to make your connection to Los Angeles that leaves in twenty minutes may be a nice way to fit in your cardio, but trust me, there are better ways. Put a tag on, and maybe even one of those little neon springs. Whatever it takes to let other travelers know to keep their mitts off your stuff, or at the very least be able to identify it as yours while you’re chasing after it.
2. Peace of mind comes from within
You should also label the inside of each bag in order to avoid losing your luggage. This information should be the most obvious item anyone who opens your bags can see. When something goes wrong, the claims report will often ask you to identify the contents of your luggage, and this will be verified. If your outside tags are torn off or removed, identifying information (name, email address, phone number) should be apparent to anyone opening your luggage. Safety pin a business card, for example, to the inside of your suitcase. Use packing tape to secure the same information to anything that makes a safety pin impractical (in my case, that list include hard cases for gear like tripods, sound equipment and lighting kits). Worried about privacy? They’re already opening your bags. It might be time to toss some of those concerns out the window. After all, you want them to be able to find you.
3. Keeping it real
You’re going to be hearing this advice a lot from now on, because it needs to be your mantra too. Print everything. I’ve been hearing we’re moving to a paperless world for about twenty five years, but in the face of QR check-in from my phone, online reservations on my watch and what I have to assume will eventually be in-flight movies beamed directly to the pleasure center of my brain, paper is somehow still here.
It’s here because it works. It works everywhere, and it works when the internet doesn’t and computers fail. Paper versions of your itinerary are absolutely crucial, and they are timesavers. I learned this in New Zealand, where they very much want you to visit, but they also very much want you to leave. Upon entering the country, the customs officials will want to see a paper version of an itinerary showing your departure date as their first guarantee you will eventually be bidding farewell to their pleasant country.
For the purposes of this post, paper is powerful when it comes to your luggage. Take the time to take a picture of each piece of luggage you’re taking (and again, this includes your carry-on bags), and then print a copy of that picture.
Take a close up of the model or brand logo of each bag also. Most travelers, and you are very likely one of them, have no idea what the brand name or model of their luggage is. Place yourself a cut above by knowing this information, and having a picture of it. It’s far more useful than writing “mostly black with trim” on a claims form at the lost luggage counter.
Keep those printed pictures in whatever item is not leaving your side – your purse, your laptop bag, your briefcase… whatever. When your luggage is lost, you have the absolute best piece of information on hand to attach to a claims form to assist whoever is searching for your bags.
4. Stopping short
A few months ago, one of my good friends found the first day of his trip to Adelaide, Australia more than a little frustrating, since his bags only made it as far as Sydney. I took note of his travails, as my crew and I would be flying almost the same route for our documentary shoot. We almost made a critical mistake, and the fault would have been entirely ours. We did not account for the fact that although we were ticketed all the way through to our final destination of Adelaide, our bags were only ticketed to Melbourne. We were responsible for claiming our bags in the first arrival airport of our final destination country, and clearing those bags through customs before switching them to an internal domestic flight. Our production almost stopped before it began, but thanks to a glance at the claims sticker on our boarding passes, we noticed our bags were destined to stop at Melbourne instead of Adelaide. At that point, it was all on us. Knowing this, we were able to avoid losing our luggage.
This may be the learning curve of an international travel novice, but you know what? A lot of us are in that position. Perhaps you’re one of them, or perhaps it may just slip your mind in the rush of changing planes, changing terminals, the crush of jet lag or any number of other travel hassles you will be facing. When you’re checking your bags, confirm with the check-in agent where you need to claim your luggage personally – at your final destination or somewhere along the way.
In our most recent production shoot, we had to reclaim our bags on the return trip when we arrived in Los Angeles, not San Francisco – because we were switching from an international terminal to a domestic terminal. Remember, just because you are flying in exclusively international airports does not mean you are traveling in exclusively international terminals. If it helps your state of mind, confirm with a gate agent when you arrive in a new country whether or not you need to claim your bags. It could save you days of headaches.
A final thought: avoiding Boaz
Every day, huge shipments of orphaned suitcases make their way to that Scottsboro warehouse where your lost luggage is their gain. I repeat what I said at the beginning of this post. It doesn’t have to be this way. Start by taking the simple steps outlined here, and you can start your journey with the odds more in your favor that both you and your luggage can enjoy your travels.
Next week. Jet lag and tips to avoid it.
