Any airline passenger who's ever lugged a suitcase to a check-in gate and bid his or her bag adieu has likely wondered what goes on beyond those rubbery black curtains.And if you think your journey as a passenger is tedious, wait until you hear what happens to your suitcase in that conveyor belted underworld into which all checked bags descend.Under the promise of anonymity, a baggage handler with a decade of experience working for a major airline agreed to dish the dirt with us on the scene behind the scenes.
On embarrassing baggage situations:
Unless there’s something wrong with the bags, we don’t go through them. But every once in a while, we’ll get a bag with a humming noise coming from it, and we’ll have to open it. Normally it is just an electric razor or toothbrush with a battery that gets turned on while the bag is being tossed around. So we open the bag and turn it off. No big deal.But on one occasion, we came across a bag that we couldn’t get open...
Embarrassing buzzing noises
So we had to go out to the tarmac, where the passengers were boarding, and call the owner up to claim the suitcase. It was a woman, and we told her, 'Sorry, your bag is vibrating, you’ll have to open it.' She knew what it was right away - her face turned bright red. She opened it up, and there was her vibrator flopping around. She turned it off, and said to us, all embarrassed, 'I’m a single person who travels alone a lot…' And I’m like, 'You don’t have to justify it to me, just zip up the suitcase and we’ll pop it in the plane.' And that was that.
Lost, found and stolen
I’ve heard about baggage handlers stealing stuff, but no-one ever says who got caught and what was stolen. You just kind of hear rumours. But I honestly don’t know how it happens because as a baggage handler you’re in very wide-open areas of the airport - you have people all around you and there are cameras everywhere. I always wonder how people have the time to go through bags and take something. But by no means is it always the baggage crew stealing stuff. Passengers will steal bags in the claim areas, too, and a lot of the time we catch them. .
Things get lost
A lot of times you might think something was stolen, but it just fell out of your bag. If you don’t have the zip closed, or there’s a tear or rip in the bag, a lot of the small stuff falls out - Swiss army knives, keys, wallets, mobiles.There are huge lost and found boxes at any airport, and we’ve got more mobiles and chargers than you can imagine.
On luxury luggage and the (non) functionality of fragile stickers:
Whether it’s a cheap duffel bag or a Prada or Louis Vuitton suitcase - it all gets treated the same. I’m sure there are a handful of baggage handlers who know the difference, but there are a lot of knock-off designer bags coming from China anyway.
How your bag gets treated
What most passengers don’t understand is that most of the time, all the baggage handling is done mechanically by computers and robots. When they weigh your bag and push it down the belt at the check-in counter, it goes behind the wall and rides miles and miles of belts - it's being scanned by lasers, passing through different checkpoints and getting routed depending on the airline and the city.
Sorting out a puzzle
By the time the baggage handler actually sees your bag at the aeroplane, all he's trying to do is put a piece of a puzzle together in the cargo hold as quickly as possible. The cargo holds are actually very, very small, with a curved bottom and a flat top, so it’s really like working a puzzle. He’s got garment bags, briefcases, soft sided and hard-sided suitcases, golf bags, strollers, car seats and so on. He really doesn’t care what kind of suitcase yours is or how much it costs - he just cares how to put it all together to take up the least amount of space.On a medium sized plane with roughly 150 bags, they’re going to be stacked five high and five across, ten rows deep, with the heaviest bags on the bottom.
'Bad apples out there'
Go ahead and put a fragile sticker on your suitcase. But I’m not going to lie - there are bad apples out there, and they might see that fragile sticker and either make a joke or even treat the bag a little rougher.We see these huge bags that weigh a ton, stuffed with all sorts of stuff. Then there’s a fragile sticker on it and it’s like please - you know there’s no delicate piece of crystal or an on ornament in that heavy, over-packed bag. Do those passengers really think their bag is going to be treated any differently?
Handling 50,000 bags a day
Even if someone comes to us and says 'My bag has a glass frame in it,' that fragile sticker is only relevant at your original departure point. If you connect, there’s no way for us to let, say, New York know that when this flight comes in there’s a bag with a very special picture frame with a fragile sticker on it We can’t just say, 'Look for the black one' - at a busy airport, there are 50,000 bags going through per day.
On Bizarre Baggage:
Particularly on flights to lesser-developed countries, people bring all sorts of weird stuff that you don’t normally see in suitcases - it's usually stuff their families can’t get, or things that are considered a luxury. We see a lot of mechanical and hardware items that you take for granted that you could go to Wal-Mart and pick up. Boxes break open, and we’ve seen small engines for lawn mowers, a lot of car parts - air filters, oil filters, starters and alternators. You name it.
Smelly baggage
Then there are the food items. When I worked at one international US airport, just about every flight coming in had either Italian sausage or Polish sausage, but it wouldn’t be refrigerated and it would just start turning bad after a nine-hour flight.People bring other delicacies, too - things from Thailand and China. We’ve seen crickets and snails and different kinds of unidentifiable meat. Usually it comes to our attention because they’ve just wrapped it in wax paper and tossed it in their bag thinking, 'I’m going half-way around the world, that'll do.'
On Bad packers:
You can definitely tell the difference between the business traveler and the person who travels only once or twice a year. The business traveler has one suitcase and knows exactly what they need. Families who only travel once or twice a year bring everything they could possibly need and more!
Bulky packers
It does amaze us when people are going for a weekend getaway, and they bring these ridiculously sized suitcases.People will bring four different outfits per day. The cruise ship crowds tend to have packing issues, too, with suitcase after suitcase completely full.Then there are the cases of just poor decision making when packing - such as tossing a bottle of wine in as an afterthought. The bottle breaks and you pick up their bag and there’s stuff dripping out the bottom.
Luggage tags are no guarantee
It happens that the routing tags just fall off or bags get mis-tagged. So if your nametag is not on your bag, it’s really hard to reunite passengers with their luggage. If you’re flying to Paris or Frankfurt or one of the big airports, you’re likely to be fine. But if you’re flying into some small airport in the middle of Europe, you may never see your bag again.Be smart and put your name and itinerary on a sheet of paper inside your bag, because if there’s nothing on the outside to ID the bag we’ll go looking inside to see if there’s some way to locate the passenger
Less bags, less likely to get lost
Also, if you’re a family of four traveling, don’t have a separate suitcase for each person. Mix and match - have one outfit for each person in each suitcase. That way if one bag gets lost or destroyed, you’re not stranded and at least it doesn’t ruin your vacation.
Use some common sense
Almost once a week, someone will say, 'You lost my bag,'claiming that their heart medication was in there. And I’m thinking, if something that important is in their checked luggage, why did they put it in there in the first place? Whether it’s medication or materials for an important presentation, it’s just common sense - don’t put anything in your checked bag that you can’t live without once you get there.
If you’re shipping anything really valuable, send it Fed Ex.
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