how to lessen the pain caused by a delayed or missing luggage

Take a picture of your bag
for reference.

Although I am a firm believer in not checking in a bag (due to my founded fear of the airline losing or misplacing it) and not paying a third party to ship it to my destination (because I tend to visit multiple destinations and those fees could get expensive), there have been times when I had to check it in (hiking poles and bottles of wine, apparently, could not be in a carry-on bag). In fact, I’ve had my bag gone AWOL twice. Considering I rarely check bags in, that percentage is high! So, what did I do before the trip that helped lessen the pain of airlines misplacing or losing my bag? 

1.                  I bought travel insurance. If the travel gods decreed that I should part permanently with my bag, I could make a claim and get some kind of compensation from someone.

2.                  I packed an emergency change of clothing in my carry-on. Packing two extra pairs of underwear, and a lightweight shirt and skirt (or pants, depending on the season/destination) along with travel-sized toiletries in my carry-on have made my life a bit more comfortable when my bag failed to come out of the luggage carousel. To make sure the extra clothes did not take much room, I packed them in a gallon-sized Ziploc bag and squeezed the air out of them. They hardly weighed anything. As a plus, I knew those clothes were protected from a sudden downpour (or a spilled water bottle).  Having extra clothes worked really well when I flew to Zanzibar while my checked bag apparently stayed behind at the Kilimanjaro Airport.

3.                  I had a list of the items in my bag (or I took a picture of the contents of my bag). In the event I had to make a claim with the airline and/or travel insurer, I knew exactly what items I lost.

4.                  If traveling with a partner, we split our belongings between two bags. This strategy worked very well when an airline misplaced one of two checked bags my husband and I brought during a multi-leg trip.  (I'm looking at you, EasyJet!) Although both of us didn’t have all of our belongings for approximately one week, we took comfort in the fact that we at least had some clothes instead of one of us having no clothes at all.

5.                  I made sure that my checked bag stood out from the other bags on the luggage carousel. I could have bought a colorful bag, but I didn’t because I liked my basic dark-colored bags (I usually travel with either a grey Osprey backpack or a black Eagle Creek rolly bag). To make my bag stand out from all the others coming out of the luggage carousel, I made sure mine had a bright luggage tag or ribbon or something that made it stand out to lessen the chance that another traveler would mistakenly take it.

 

6.                  I made sure I labeled my bag properly – inside and outside. I always made sure that I had my current contact information (name, address, phone number and email) in a piece of paper inside and outside my bag. When EasyJet lost my bag for about one week, they had no idea where my bag went (presumably because the gate agent forgot to affix a luggage tag after I checked it in).  Luckily, an employee of British Airways emailed me to let me know that they found my bag somewhere in the bowels of Gatwick Airport. It definitely paid off for me to update the contact information written inside that cute luggage tag holder that came with the bag when I bought it and sticking a piece of paper with the same information inside my bag (on top of my belongings). Hurrah for having current email information in my bag!

7.                  I took a picture of the bag I checked in. Each time an airline lost my bag, I had to describe it. It helped that I had a picture of it along with its brand, color and approximate size.

8.                  I made sure that the gate agent put a luggage tag  with the correct final destination on my bag that matched the luggage claim tag. Amidst the excitement of traveling and the hectic nature of airports, the one time I forgot to pay attention and see if the EasyJet gate agent put that luggage tag on my bag, it went missing for a week. Go figure. I became very vigilant about making sure a correct luggage tag was on my bag for the remainder of that multi-leg trip.

I hope you never lose your bag while traveling. But, if you take the steps I described above, hopefully, it won’t suck as much if it goes missing. What have you done to minimize the pain of dealing with a missing or lost luggage?