The airline lost my bag and I'm the last one at the carousel
The belt stopped twenty minutes ago. My suit for tomorrow is in that bag. — Best man, 2023
When an airline finally gives up on a bag, it can end up for sale in Scottsboro, Alabama. A store there has been buying lost luggage since 1970. Live snakes have turned up in the suitcases. Most bags do get home, eventually. SITA, which runs a bag-tracing system for the airlines, counted 4.9 mishandled bags per 1,000 passengers in 2025. That's still 24 million bags. Now you can tuck a tracker inside and send the airline a link to where it sits. Apple and Google both set that up with the airlines. So your phone knows where the bag is. Somebody still has to go get it.
For now: put a tracker in your checked bag, and if it doesn't come out, attach its share link to the airline's lost-bag report.
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