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Tags: Lost Luggage / Baggage Fees / Airline News / Airline Hell / Luggage / → All Tags
1.8 Million Bags Were Lost In 2008; Where Did They All Go?
Do you swear that the airlines have it out for you and so manage to lose your bags 9 times out of ten? Well, you aren't all that special since lost baggage is still very much an epidemic, and Andrew Price, the head of the International Air Transport Association's Baggage Improvement Program, can attest to this. He not only has his own bags lost or delayed much of the time, but it's actually his job to see that this doesn't happen.
Poor Mr. Price; he just admitted this embarrassing fact to the Wall Street Journal and they've used it as a jumping-off point to take a deeper look at the barely-turning cogs behind international airline luggage movement:
Tags: Crime / JFK / Baggage / Lost Luggage / → All Tags
Two Airport Workers Caught In Baggage Theft Sting At JFK
Reason number 1,679 to avoid checking baggage: yesterday, cops nabbed two JFK airport workers, one a TSA agent, who had been going through passengers' baggage and blatantly stealing items of value.
It seems that the airport and Delta Airlines had noticed an unexplainable amount of missing items from luggage over the past year, and so set up a sting operation to test for sticky fingers among ground crew. The police checked a bag, filled with a laptop, two cell phones and an iPod, onto a flight from JFK to Miami and easily caught the pair of thieves pilfering the goods before the luggage had even boarded the plane.
To confuse matters for the unlucky passenger claiming the bag at its destination, the pair then tore off the bag tag. If convicted, each man faces up to 4 years in prison, so let's hope there's some more condeming evidence back at their homes to keep them out of our baggage claim forever.
Related Stories:
· Sting nabs stickey-fingered JFK airport workers going through luggage [NY Daily News]
· Airport employees caught in theft sting [ABCNews]
· You Know That Thing You’re Afraid Happens to Your Luggage After You Check It? [Daily Intel]
· Travel Crime Coverage [Jaunted]
[Photo: tttallis]
Tags: Virgin Blue / Australia Travel / Lost Luggage / Terrorism / → All Tags
Virgin Blue Decides Which Guitars Can Fly Where
We really thought the Richard Branson-led Aussie low cost carrier Virgin Blue would be cooler than it demonstrated this week.
Long-serving Australian musician Steve Lucas - he's not exactly a household name around the world, but his band X have been playing longer than most of us have been alive – was doing what he often does, taking a Virgin Blue flight to get down from Sydney to a gig in Melbourne. But then the airline took all of Lucas's luggage off the plane.
It wasn't because one of his three guitars was in a box that looked like a coffin; no, the problem was that one of his guitar straps was decorated with empty bronze bullet cartridges. Lucas landed in Melbourne and discovered that for some reason, all three guitars had been sent to Canberra, and the Virgin Blue complaints line told him he was "potentially a terrorist." Perhaps they know something about the quality of his music that we don't.
Related Stories:
· Virgin On the Ridiculous [The Age]
· Virgin Blue Coverage [Jaunted]
[Photo: monkeyc.net]
Tags: Baggage / Lost Luggage / Shopping / Bizarre Travel / → All Tags
Where Unclaimed Baggage Goes to Die (And Live Again)
Ever lose your luggage on a flight and wonder what happens to bags that never get reunited with their woeful owners?
Well, a good deal of it ends up in Scottsboro, Alabama at a massive thrift store called the Unclaimed Baggage Center. UBC buys unclaimed luggage from airlines in bulk, to the tune of 7,000 new items a day (that's a lot of lost bags!) Then everything is sold to the public out of their Alabama warehouse, and we do mean everything. Clothes, cameras, iPods, exotic souvenirs, prescription eyeglasses, and of course the bags themselves.
They've also got a museum where they put aside the stuff found in lost bags that's just too good to sell—for example, a life-size version of the creepy Hoggle puppet from the movie Labyrinth and a slew of 3,000-year-old Egyptian artifacts. Seems like those could have been reunited with their rightful owners, but oh well, finders keepers.
Related Stories:
· Unclaimed Baggage Center [Official Site]
· US Air Eats Luggage For Breakfast [Jaunted]
· Shopping coverage [Jaunted]
[Photo: J-Rad]
