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Unit 5 How to Avoid Lost Luggage and What to Do About Lost Luggage

You can learn how to avoid lost luggage in transit and what to do if it does happen to you.

The best way to avoid lost luggage is to carry it on, but that's ridiculously hard with new airport rules. Airlines usually allow you to carry on two bags - one at 22X9X15 and one that the airline will define as a purse, tote or such.

Check the airline's rules! And don't check bags unless you need to for your liquids and gels.

How to pack for airport security. What Can You Carry On?

Label your baggage outside

Before checking a bag (leaving a bag when you check in which then goes in the plane's cargo hold), label it inside and out. Labeling bags is only a little helpful to the folks looking for your lost luggage, but very helpful when you need to claim them. Use the outside tag holder if the bag came with one and use one of the tags you'll find at airline check in counters; tie that tag's elasticized string around your bag's handle. Keep the stubs you'll get when you check. And when you check, always have a carry on bag, too, containing your passport and items you cannot lose. Read about cash stashing, too.

Label your baggage inside

It’s better to tape a card with your name and address to the inside lid of your backpack and leave a copy of your itinerary and tickets inside in plain sight in the hopes that someone might actually read it if trying to unite you with your bag. To your travel itinerary, it’s better to paper clip a sheet with your cell phone number and your home phone and write "phone number" on it in relevant languages.

Color tags your bag

Get a small roll of bright tape (like fluorescent lime) and wrap a piece around something on your bag, like a backpack strap or handle strap. You can spot your bag in a whole pile of similar-looking bags or in someone else's hand. You can also list it as an identifying mark if reporting lost luggage. Keep the tape while traveling for labeling all kinds of stuff, like your food in a hostel kitchen fridge. Bright survey tape (hardware store), though not sticky, also works as a tag.

A picture is worth a thousand descriptions

Take a picture of your bag, preferably with color tag, and store it in your phone's camera or in your digital camera. Print it out and keep it with your passport in your carry on or passport holder, too. If you have to report a missing bag, you have an easy way (your phone) to show the lost luggage people (more on them below) what your bag looks like. If you have it in your phone and have a hard copy, you can leave the copy at the baggage counter (more on that below) if you have to leave the airport without your bag.

Tear off old tags

Before checking your baggage, rip off any old baggage tags another airline may have put on your bags - big tags looped around a handle with old flight info on them. If baggage handlers don't have to tear off your backpack's baggage tags from the last flight, that's a little less time your bag's literally being handled, lessening damage opportunities.

Wait for your bags

Get to the area of the airport where your baggage will be being unloaded as fast as possible after your flight lands. If you're going to what's called Baggage Claim, you'll arrive long before the bags; look above big oval carousels for your flight number - that flight's bags will be dumped down a chute to that carousel. Watch for your color tags. If bags are being unloaded on the tarmac from a small plane, watch yours until it's in your hand (you can probably walk up and grab it).