Travel Tip 74
Update on lost and delayed luggage
You have a connection, but did your checked bag make the connection too?
Welcome to my newsletter! Every week I send you a travel tip, plus links to my latest blogs and articles.
I have good news, just in time for the busiest travel season!
Last year I wrote about what to do about delayed luggage, both in preparation for Thanksgiving and in reaction to a disaster with my suitcase delayed between Alaska Airlines and Latam Airlines. The first of my five tips in my newsletter 15 from October, 2023, was to always put an AirTag in any luggage that you check. It’s something I’ve done consistently since that luggage debacle.
That little green bag with the red zipper holds my AirTag and I always put it in checked luggage.
What if you could share your AirTag location with airlines?
I’ve gotten in the habit of not only putting an AirTag in my checked luggage, but I also look at the Find My app on my phone when I board the plane, to see if my luggage now shows as being with me. This is what I thought would save me on my flight from Seattle to Los Angeles last year. Before my plane even left Seattle, I had figured out my bag wasn’t on the plane and filed a missing bag report in the Alaska Airlines app.
I hoped my quick action would get my bag to LA in time for my flight to Peru. It didn’t work, but only because I had such a tight connection in LA. My suitcase got to LA just fine, but since it missed the connection to Peru, it languished in LA for about a week. Despite the frustration with trying to get Latam to accept my bag from Alaska, I was reassured to see my bag was still in LAX and hadn’t gotten put on the wrong flight to somewhere else.
Have you used an AirTag?
This is what the Find My app looks like when it’s tracking my two AirTags. You can see that one of my tags is with me in Lima, and the other is still in Los Angeles, 4,167 miles away.
Thankfully, I accidentally switched the tags and I had the computer bag with me and just the luggage was left in LA. Besides knowing where your stuff is, you can give each tag a name and know where different pieces of luggage are - as long as you get the tag with the right name in the right bag.
I was lucky because Alaska Airlines kept my suitcase in their luggage office and knew where it was. If it had gotten lost in the shuffle of bags in Seattle, I would have needed to share its location with Alaska to even get it to LA, much less to Peru. It took about a week of calling Latam every day but eventually they accepted the bag from Alaska and flew it to Cusco.
If the airline says that your bag is lost, but you can see where it is with your AirTag, you’ll soon be able to share that information with the airline.
This is a new software update part of iOS 18.2 will let you share your AirTag’s location with third parties and so far over a dozen airlines have signed up for the program. Alaska Airlines isn’t on the list yet, but both Delta and United are in the beginning stages of onboarding the new technology.
You might not get to use it this Thanksgiving, since we’re still in the early stages of updates.
However, stay tuned for the program being available for holiday travel at the end of the year, and for sure by Thanksgiving next year. Does anybody else think that AirTags are going to be big sellers for Black Friday this year?
(For the record, none of this is sponsored. I’m not selling anything, just sharing my personal travel tips).
Article
I was thrilled to see Fodor’s Travel put my article about Peru’s Colca Canyon first on their list of the top places to go in South America next year. I first visited Colca Canyon in 2013 and loved it, so I was happy Fodor’s included it for the top 25 places to go in 2025. Colca is beautiful, and to get there you’ll probably go through Arequipa, which I also love. Honestly, I’m always glad to see something besides Machu Picchu featured as a destination in Peru.
Blog
I first did this hike in 2020 and went back last week with Explora. The hike is just as lovely now as it was four years ago, but now it has better signs. Click on the blog title above to read about why you should try this hike in Yucay.
