The premise doesn't make sense: these bags are not "lost", they're being sold in a specific store, why aren't the owners looking for them there?
The title is misleading but it's explained in the post, these are "unclaimed luggage". Most likely the owner decided to take the compensation option when it was taking too long for the airline to find it.
The article does mention a case of someone finding his own item in that store, more by accident than by intentionally looking for it.
I'd have to have something astronomically valuable or personally significant to me in order to go all the way to Alabama and root around in a warehouse just for the off-chance of finding it.
Most people aren't flying with the sole manuscript for their novel checked in their baggage. How much time do you think they're going to be willing to invest in getting some old clothes back? They just claim on insurance and forget about it.
> I'd have to have something astronomically valuable or personally significant ...
Precisely what's described in TFA.
"A presidential platinum Rolex watch worth $64k (sold for $32k)"
"A 5.8-carat diamond ring appraised for $46k (sold for $23k)"
Or, more poignantly (but perhaps less factually specific) from the intro:
"A few days later, a retired mechanic named Charlie buys your grandfather’s watch for $150 ... and ... a nurse from Florida becomes the proud new owner of the scarf your mum knitted you for Christmas."
The first couple may be something you'd overlook if $-reimbursed by insurance, but I could imagine circumstances where the last couple of examples would inspire a ceaseless search.
I think GP was referring to people that desperately wanted their belongings back.
I understand that a lot of business flyers would write off their underwear, toothbrush, and gym shoes -- but I don't think GP was suggesting those people should be dumpster diving in Alabamaba. (I'm in Australia, and I really don't have any idea how inconvenient it is to get to Alabama, and to then dive through a warehouse of bags, assuming it's even possible.)
> They're listing outlying extreme cases. Most people aren't travelling with a $64k watch in their checked baggage.
It says this in the article only a third of it is worth selling at any price.
Totally agree - but the point is that in some cases (npi) there clearly were valuables worth the effort, at least from a naive calculation perspective.
Though, not to victim blame, but who on earth puts things that are very valuable and aren't even bulky or heavy in their checked luggage? I rarely check luggage (and in >1M miles of travel have never had it permanently lost) but I don't even check things like a favorite pair of custom-made hiking boots.
I don’t know how “pointing out how somebody did something colossally risky and/or stupid” became Victim Blamimg but I agree with you. Don’t check any luggage you absolutely need to keep.
Well, you fly from Perth or wherever to Chattanooga, TN, rent car, and drive the hour or hour and a half southwest to Scottsboro. Follow the signs from that point.
The airline holds luggage for at least 3 months; then there's the time taken to ship it to Alabama, pile it in the corner, sort it, price it, and put it out. I like Scottsboro, but hanging around for months on the off chance that Granma's sweater will show up is just not going to happen.
> In 1992, Roy Hall, a 46-year-old minister, bought a royal blue Hickey-Freeman jacket at Unclaimed Baggage. When he took it home, he noticed the name “Whitey Ford” — a Hall of Fame pitcher for the Yankees — written inside of it. Informed of the find, Ford asked for his jacket back; Hall decided to keep it.
Who cares if it’s true; the minister is like, “return a lost article to its rightful owner? Nah.”
Yes, if you claim it was ‘stolen’, the burden of proof is you to provide proof that the law considers the property stolen rather than forfeited (if you want to avoid downvotes, that is) FWIW, I didn’t downvote you.
There’s an entirely separate moral/ethical argument aside from the legal one where one may decide they should return it based on their own morals/ethics.
I don't get it. The owner of the jacket is a jacket short, he finds out someone has it and that person doesn't give it back ? Not the first time to happen, laws have already dealt with things like that.
What I wrote is not up to debate, it's common in the law in the US and in most of Europe (AFAICT).
You can debate the finer points (that's why I wrote “actual wording and consequences may vary depending on where you live”) but the idea is still the same. Don't mess with stolen stuff.
Eg: In Scotland, when goods are stolen, the person who originally owned them is still the legal owner. If you discover you've bought stolen goods you should stop using them immediately. If you know who the legal owner of the goods is you should inform them that you have their goods and let them take them away. If you don’t give them back and the owner finds out you have them, the owner can apply for a court order to make you return the goods.
We could debate the moral/ethical argument but I purposely didn't take that approach.
edit: ah, I see, I didn't understand why you used the phrasing “Yes, if you claim it was ‘stolen’,” and thought it was a universal “you” but you were talking about the very specifics of that case. I don't know why, I got on the macro level too soon.
Of course, I see, we now have to check what the law says or allows for that company about unclaimed luggage and the best efforts the company made to find the rightful owner before being granted ownership of the jacket.
“Possession is 9/10th the law” has a lot of truth to it. The liability here should rest with the airline as bailee, but they disclaim liability beyond some trivial amount, so the bailor (traveller) is taking a risk by failing to “manifest the desire to exclude others” without adequate protection.
What? The airline may not be liable, but the minister certainly is. Retaining property clearly owned by someone else (by label and by spoken affirmation) is theft pure and simple.
Unfortunately this is not correct. It isn’t legally theft (though morally it surely isn’t the right thing to do). Theft implies someone was “manifesting the desire to exclude others” and someone else took it anyways. Once you hand over your luggage, you have a contract with the airline whereby you’ve waived many of your rights and limited the few that remain. Once the luggage goes missing, you are entitled only to those limited rights under your contract with the airline. The newly found luggage can be sold as unowned goods.
There’s centuries of common law that back this up. It sucks, yes.
> Theft implies someone was “manifesting the desire to exclude others”.
That can't be the whole story though. You can't keep stolen property, even if you bought it from a 3rd party and were under the impression that the transaction was legal. Lost&found might not be stolen, but if the airline 'finds it' without the intention to return it, it's not that far off.
To be fair, if the airline has already recompensed you for your lost luggage, then you no longer have a right to it. Once you take the money, you're no longer the rightful owner. :)
Surely an urban legend. I'm expected to believe Mr Hall wrote to Mr Ford (1992 was pre-email, pre-internet, pre-social media) to inform him that he'd found his jacket, but then refused to return it? I mean, who else but Mr Hall himself could have "informed" Ford? And how did the luggage store become aware of any of this, who told them?
In fact, given the improvements in luggage tracking, in recent years, I'd bet "Unclaimed Luggage" is mostly a lie as well. My guess is that a very small percentage of the store's inventory comes from lost airline luggage these days. Most likely, it's stuff left behind at hotels, abandoned storage units, "imperfect" textiles and goods, pawn store inventories, police confiscations, bankruptcy auctions, even lost/overboard shipping containers.
How does the airline have the legal right to sell your items, and at a possibly lower value than the contents are worth? The article says a diamond rings and expensive watches were discovered. $3k in compensation likely seems insufficient.
You can buy insurance for everything, so I was surprised something as obvious as this isn't available; a quick search found lots of 3rd party baggae insurance policies. If you want to find out the true cost of lost luggage it's some profit margin less than these premiums.
Though I suspect there's quite a bit of adverse selection going on there. I know that on the rare occasions I buy travel insurance it's because I have expensive non-refundable reservations of some sort, typically requiring physical activity that I can't do if I sprain my ankle the week before.
They shouldn't have to compensate if they kept better track of luggage.
Right now they have no incentive to improve themselves or prevent theft by underpaid, overworked baggage handlers.
Every suitcase is labeled with a name and a flight. They know exactly who the baggage belongs to, they just can't be bothered to call people who forgot a suitcase or send people their luggage back. I don't see why we should accept anything other than either return of the baggage or full compensation.
>Right now they have no incentive to improve themselves or prevent theft by underpaid, overworked baggage handlers.
>Every suitcase is labeled with a name and a flight. They know exactly who the baggage belongs to, they just can't be bothered to call people who forgot a suitcase or send people their luggage back.
They do have an incentive: The $3k compensation. The fact that that's not enough, shows that it's a bit more complex then calling people.
>I don't see why we should accept anything other than either return of the baggage or full compensation.
Because otherwise accepting luggage would be to risky for airlines, or, as another commenter suggested, they'd have to make people buy insurance.
> Every suitcase is labeled with a name and a flight. They know exactly who the baggage belongs to
For whatever it's worth, I once lost my drivers license on an airplane and it was returned to me in the mail a few months later. Of course, returning a drivers license cost them a lot less (nothing) than returning luggage would have. I'm not sure they had an incentive to return it though, beyond basic courtesy.
(Evidently if you drop a drivers license in the mail without postage or an envelope, the USPS will send it on to whatever address is listed on it.)
And no, not every suitcase is labeled, that's the entire point. Luggage gets lost when those tags get torn off, chewed up, etc. Luggage is handled by both humans and conveyor belts, and all sorts of things can go wrong.
And how would you define "full compensation"? If your luggage is lost, you could just lie and say it was carrying a million dollars in cash. How is anybody going to prove what full compensation is?
Or, if you were required to declare the value of your luggage when checking in, and you said it was a million dollars, the airline would just say nope, not gonna take it. Too risky for us if we lose it, which we can't guarantee because we employ fallible human beings.
Smart people work on this. The current solution really is a pretty good one, for what's practically achievable given the price you pay for your ticket.
But we could use machine learning and put the results on a blockchain and...
I do think some people dismiss systems that work well enough and which just aren't worth getting another tenth of a percent out of. Airline baggage tracking has actually gotten a lot better over the past few decades. The only time I've had luggage significantly delayed in decades was the result of a canceled international connection which involved being transferred to a different airline. That cost me a fair bit of money and was almost much worse than it was but it was one time.
Even the US post office will not insure any package for more than $50,000, and most packages have a maximum insurance of just $5,000.
Most companies are not interested in guaranteeing the transportation of extreme valuables because it's not a service they can profitably provide at a level people are willing to pay for.
There is a middle ground where they actually make a small amount of effort and trash the stuff that is unclaimed instead of profiting off it. Then there would be an incentive to be slightly competent as everything that didn't get back to the owners added trivially to your trash bill instead of netting you a profit.
In fact if you want to do one better charge a small conveyance fee for the cost of handling it say $10 and the incentives will be ever better aligned with doing a reasonable job.
It’s part of the standard terms & conditions, like burying it in software EULA, and because it is standard in the industry, they don’t have to call it out in any special way or get separate waivers. You agree to it when you buy your ticket.
Depends on the state and where the airline is based. And since we’re dealing with airlines, you may have tribunals/agencies available to you that are far more accessible/cheap/free.
I know of a few well known tourist attractions in the UK who accumulate a lot of lost property tend to hold onto it for a period of time and then auction off high value items and donate the money to charity. Otherwise things tend to rot away in lost property stores for years. The amount of space required to store lost property for those type of organisations is crazy too.
Better idea: Don't put wildly expensive things in your checked bags.
I'd wager most of those items are pre-TSA anyway as they have a pattern of stealing things. Years ago I visited the Microsoft employee store in Redmond where you could buy Xbox games for super cheap. They actually had a sign at the register warning people not to put them in checked bags because they disappeared.
> I'd wager most of those items are pre-TSA anyway as they have a pattern of stealing things.
How do you know it's TSA and not the airline's baggage handlers? The latter actually handle your bags a lot more than the former (and do so in places which are not monitored with security cameras).
It’s possible, but there is literally no reason for an airline baggage handler to open a bag. They would need a lot of time alone with the bags to dig through each one looking for valuables without being caught.
TSA gets the advantage of seeing inside of the bags on a screen to know which ones to “pull for more inspection”.
I left a tablet computer behind once on a plane. Easily done - slide down in the magazine holder etc.
I phoned the airline. They had found it. Getting it back was impossible. It was apparently sent to Helsinki, then back to Heathrow in London. The airline just say "we had it sent to London - ask there. We're done."
Fine, but if you go to LHR and ask where the lost property office is, you are met by blank looks. No one knows. There are 5 4?) terminals, all are huge. Someone says there might be something air side in T3, someone else says there might be something near the car park in T5. Others appear to find the very concept of lost property novel and confusing.
I found one place, but they only did lost property for select airlines, and even then it is not open to the public. WTF?
It pushes me off to know that my tablet was sold off to someone despite spending ages schlepping around LHR trying to get it, having been in contact with the original airline and having it sent to London.
Had a similar experience. Left an iPad on a flight from Paris to Stockholm. Also had to go to a bunch of different places at weird locations of the airports (both in Stockholm and Paris), had to knock on closed doors and ring door bells sometimes for more than 20 minutes, only to be finally told the office was closed that day. It was also super bizarre that a private company, separate from the airlines, was in charge of lost items. I ended up being able to file a lost item claim form on paper at one of the offices, and I also filed a complaint online, but of course nothing came of it. Big effort, zero reward. Very frustrating.
You needed to call the airline staff at the destinaton airport, not the airport itself. There's a phone number for the local team for the airline. They're not supposed to give it out, but if you ask enough different people someone will.
I suppose it's the equivalent of getting support from Google - you have to either know someone working in the right team, or make enough of a stink on HN/Reddit/Twitter to have said Googlers to read it, and/or for the media to pick it up.
When I lost my kindle on easyjet I reported it to them unsuccessfuly. Months later I was contacted out of the blue by the airport lost property who had turned it on to deduce the owner's contact details.
I asked if they had received the easyjet report. They almost laughed. Of course they hadn't.
Airplane logistics are already tremendously complicated without trying to chase down personal effects that are hopping from country to country. It's just not going to be a high priority for them, nor should it be. Take your stuff with you when you get off a plane.
I can leave my positive story here- on a trip from SFO > Maui I accidentally left my laptop in a luggage bin in the SFO security check.
Called the airport as soon as I realized it, in Hawaii, and they said they could hold on to it until I returned.
Picked it up from a strange, unmarked corner of SFO when I got back.
Ultimately, being deprived of a laptop for a week in Hawaii was probably a good thing.
I left my MacBook Air in the tray that passes through the x-ray machine at SFO airport. I called the airport and they had it in lost and found. I thought for sure it would be gone!
Left my Kindle on a Southwest Airlines flight. Filled out a customer service form on the web, they sent back that they found it. I just had to pay shipping and they mailed it to my house.
I didn't put my e-reader back into my backpack after passing security in Heathrow. Two days later I received an email telling em they had found an e-reader configured with my email address. They asked me to describe it, I mentioned which was the book I was reading at the time, and they sent it back to me. My only complaint is that the fee was quite high, almost as much as the reader itself. Still better and less wasteful than buying a new one.
I left my Kindle on an Emirates flight to HYD. I thought it was lost forever, but on the last day of my trip, a coworker mentioned I should just get to the airport a little early and ask. It took maybe 30 minutes, but at the end of it, my Kindle was back in my hand!
Yes, Last year I watched a video of someone traveling from UK to Germany to participate in an auction.
It was on youtube, searching for "Germany lost luggage auction" turn a lot of results, could not find the exact one.
I'm curious why they have their own online store [1] instead of just putting everything up for sale on eBay. People know to shop on eBay, most people have never heard of this store. I know eBay takes a 10% cut, but auctions result in surprisingly high prices, and you also don't have the cost of building and maintaining your own website.
Presumably running their own website costs less than the 10% cut ebay would take. Given some of the numbers in the article this seems about right: if you've got enough cash flowing through the business to maintain a 40k sq. ft. warehouse then running a website probably isn't too much hassle.
I looked through the electronics category on their site, and many of the prices were outrageous—sometimes nearly twice as much as buying an item new.[0] You can’t really pull that off on eBay.
Most of their inventory appears to be comprised of clothing and accessories. I can’t really assess pricing there, but if it’s anything like the pricing for electronics, they’re preying on impulse buyers.
I regularly shopped at UBC in person pre-pandemic. Prices for electronics are decided by a group called "Operations" that presumably operates out of an adjacent building. Unmarked items are either withheld from sale for the day, matched to a similar item on shelves, or checked on the spot with a VoIP call to Operations or by a manager, usually by searching eBay. I think the online store was created in response to the pandemic.
The amount of care taken to price each item depends on whether it can be identified by brand or model. Items without either usually fall into a generic category based on the shape, weight, and ports.
It could be considered "worth it" to dig through every shelf, bin, and table in Electronics for some seriously capable but nondescript tech if there wasn't a pandemic on. The online selection is limited to popular, identifiable items at high prices.
That seems a bit odd, though. While there were undoubtedly some good deals on electronics, the ones I saw were all on sale—which, according to their return policy, apparently also means “all sales final.” Given that a number of those items were high-risk, the price tags were concerning.
For example, they seem to be selling modern, high-end iPhones in the $6XX range. That’s a bit cheaper than buying a stolen iPhone on Let Go, Craigslist, or Facebook Marketplace where I live.
That’s incredibly high risk. At any point, the former owner of the phone may report it lost to their carrier, and the IMEI will be blacklisted. From that point forward, the phone is effectively a brick. It may be useful for parts, but that’s it.
Does the former owner have the right to report it missing, especially if they’ve been compensated? It doesn’t really matter—the point is that they can, and they may even do so inadvertently when they go to buy a new one.
This sounds like a store I’d love to visit in person—so many obscure items that are probably too difficult to price correctly. You’re bound to find a gem eventually. Even if it isn’t worth the time you spend, it’s probably a lot of fun!
But I don’t really think that business model lends itself to eBay. Yes, you can have much wider reach and sell to more people, but your margins are going to be lower. Is it worth it? Maybe if you’re running out of space, but the prices they’re charging for some of the items on their website would have to be significantly reduced if they were to sell those items on eBay.
> This sounds like a store I’d love to visit in person—so many obscure items that are probably too difficult to price correctly. You’re bound to find a gem eventually. Even if it isn’t worth the time you spend, it’s probably a lot of fun!
Maybe I just wasn't looking hard enough, but when I went there a few years ago, it was pretty hard to find anything that was actually a good deal. The vast majority of the store is "normal" stuff (mostly random clothing and books) that's priced about the same as everywhere else, and even the obscure items are surrounded by crowds of people who have already looked over everything.
I don't doubt that if you went enough times, you might eventually find something under-priced, but for the most part it's just a somewhat-overpriced thrift shop (and not particularly fun, IMO).
I've bought several pieces of electronics from them. (It's my go-to place for Bose noise cancelling headphones.) The prices aren't especially cheap, but are significantly less than retail and do depend on condition.
That was one of the few products I saw that looked like a good deal—roughly 30% off Bose QC35 II. That seems like a legitimately good deal, and it’s a relatively low-risk sale for the consumer. You might have to pay for replacement ear cushions, but that’s about it.
There were also compelling prices on some Apple Watch accessories and certain videogames, but others had ridiculous prices.
I worked at a summer camp in NE Alabama for two summers in high school and college. Weekend trips to Unclaimed Baggage were extremely popular excursion. Definitely worth a stop if you are in the neighborhood.
"The bags have already been screened at the airport, but things often slip through the cracks. Anything of an “illegal nature” (drugs, weapons, unmarked cash) is immediately turned over to the local authorities under lock and key."
Relatively recently (I don't go over there often), the store has had a small selection of firearms, I assume from lost checked luggage.
As an aside, you know those knives and such confiscated at airport security? States sell them. There is a warehouse in Austin with a bunch of related stuff, including collectible knives if you're interested in such things. It also disposes of retired state office furniture and things like what the GSA sells for the federales at gsaauctions.gov.
Am I correct in saying these goods are still legally owned by their original owner if ever discovered?
Meaning if I buy a rare musical instrument from this unclaimed baggage company, I have to live with the possibility forever that someone else might show up at my door with a sheriff and take my musical instrument because they were the original owner?
91 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadThe title is misleading but it's explained in the post, these are "unclaimed luggage". Most likely the owner decided to take the compensation option when it was taking too long for the airline to find it.
The article does mention a case of someone finding his own item in that store, more by accident than by intentionally looking for it.
Some people live far enough from Alabama that it's inconvenient to visit the store every couple of days to check.
I'd have to have something astronomically valuable or personally significant to me in order to go all the way to Alabama and root around in a warehouse just for the off-chance of finding it.
Most people aren't flying with the sole manuscript for their novel checked in their baggage. How much time do you think they're going to be willing to invest in getting some old clothes back? They just claim on insurance and forget about it.
Precisely what's described in TFA.
"A presidential platinum Rolex watch worth $64k (sold for $32k)"
"A 5.8-carat diamond ring appraised for $46k (sold for $23k)"
Or, more poignantly (but perhaps less factually specific) from the intro:
"A few days later, a retired mechanic named Charlie buys your grandfather’s watch for $150 ... and ... a nurse from Florida becomes the proud new owner of the scarf your mum knitted you for Christmas."
The first couple may be something you'd overlook if $-reimbursed by insurance, but I could imagine circumstances where the last couple of examples would inspire a ceaseless search.
It says this in the article only a third of it is worth selling at any price.
> In the end, only about one-third of the items in baggage end up for sale
I understand that a lot of business flyers would write off their underwear, toothbrush, and gym shoes -- but I don't think GP was suggesting those people should be dumpster diving in Alabamaba. (I'm in Australia, and I really don't have any idea how inconvenient it is to get to Alabama, and to then dive through a warehouse of bags, assuming it's even possible.)
> They're listing outlying extreme cases. Most people aren't travelling with a $64k watch in their checked baggage. It says this in the article only a third of it is worth selling at any price.
Totally agree - but the point is that in some cases (npi) there clearly were valuables worth the effort, at least from a naive calculation perspective.
There are also multiples of this watch for ~$25,000 on chrono24, it’s not as desirable like the steel rolexes are.
Good luck! :-)
The airline holds luggage for at least 3 months; then there's the time taken to ship it to Alabama, pile it in the corner, sort it, price it, and put it out. I like Scottsboro, but hanging around for months on the off chance that Granma's sweater will show up is just not going to happen.
Oh, and it's "Unclaimed Baggage".
> In 1992, Roy Hall, a 46-year-old minister, bought a royal blue Hickey-Freeman jacket at Unclaimed Baggage. When he took it home, he noticed the name “Whitey Ford” — a Hall of Fame pitcher for the Yankees — written inside of it. Informed of the find, Ford asked for his jacket back; Hall decided to keep it.
Who cares if it’s true; the minister is like, “return a lost article to its rightful owner? Nah.”
Easiest entries are:
1. The extremely diverse morals, frameworks, ethics, and actions different people draw from same source materials.
2. The multitude of ethical frameworks and moral people without religious roots
edit: I'd appreciate some explaining regarding the downvotes, is someone expecting me to cite the law ?
There’s an entirely separate moral/ethical argument aside from the legal one where one may decide they should return it based on their own morals/ethics.
What I wrote is not up to debate, it's common in the law in the US and in most of Europe (AFAICT).
You can debate the finer points (that's why I wrote “actual wording and consequences may vary depending on where you live”) but the idea is still the same. Don't mess with stolen stuff.
Eg: In Scotland, when goods are stolen, the person who originally owned them is still the legal owner. If you discover you've bought stolen goods you should stop using them immediately. If you know who the legal owner of the goods is you should inform them that you have their goods and let them take them away. If you don’t give them back and the owner finds out you have them, the owner can apply for a court order to make you return the goods.
Verbatim: https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/scotland/consumer/somethin...
We could debate the moral/ethical argument but I purposely didn't take that approach.
edit: ah, I see, I didn't understand why you used the phrasing “Yes, if you claim it was ‘stolen’,” and thought it was a universal “you” but you were talking about the very specifics of that case. I don't know why, I got on the macro level too soon.
Of course, I see, we now have to check what the law says or allows for that company about unclaimed luggage and the best efforts the company made to find the rightful owner before being granted ownership of the jacket.
IMO, your comment contributes to the topic of discussion.
There’s centuries of common law that back this up. It sucks, yes.
That can't be the whole story though. You can't keep stolen property, even if you bought it from a 3rd party and were under the impression that the transaction was legal. Lost&found might not be stolen, but if the airline 'finds it' without the intention to return it, it's not that far off.
In fact, given the improvements in luggage tracking, in recent years, I'd bet "Unclaimed Luggage" is mostly a lie as well. My guess is that a very small percentage of the store's inventory comes from lost airline luggage these days. Most likely, it's stuff left behind at hotels, abandoned storage units, "imperfect" textiles and goods, pawn store inventories, police confiscations, bankruptcy auctions, even lost/overboard shipping containers.
Right now they have no incentive to improve themselves or prevent theft by underpaid, overworked baggage handlers.
Every suitcase is labeled with a name and a flight. They know exactly who the baggage belongs to, they just can't be bothered to call people who forgot a suitcase or send people their luggage back. I don't see why we should accept anything other than either return of the baggage or full compensation.
>Every suitcase is labeled with a name and a flight. They know exactly who the baggage belongs to, they just can't be bothered to call people who forgot a suitcase or send people their luggage back.
They do have an incentive: The $3k compensation. The fact that that's not enough, shows that it's a bit more complex then calling people.
>I don't see why we should accept anything other than either return of the baggage or full compensation.
Because otherwise accepting luggage would be to risky for airlines, or, as another commenter suggested, they'd have to make people buy insurance.
For whatever it's worth, I once lost my drivers license on an airplane and it was returned to me in the mail a few months later. Of course, returning a drivers license cost them a lot less (nothing) than returning luggage would have. I'm not sure they had an incentive to return it though, beyond basic courtesy.
(Evidently if you drop a drivers license in the mail without postage or an envelope, the USPS will send it on to whatever address is listed on it.)
And no, not every suitcase is labeled, that's the entire point. Luggage gets lost when those tags get torn off, chewed up, etc. Luggage is handled by both humans and conveyor belts, and all sorts of things can go wrong.
And how would you define "full compensation"? If your luggage is lost, you could just lie and say it was carrying a million dollars in cash. How is anybody going to prove what full compensation is?
Or, if you were required to declare the value of your luggage when checking in, and you said it was a million dollars, the airline would just say nope, not gonna take it. Too risky for us if we lose it, which we can't guarantee because we employ fallible human beings.
Smart people work on this. The current solution really is a pretty good one, for what's practically achievable given the price you pay for your ticket.
I do think some people dismiss systems that work well enough and which just aren't worth getting another tenth of a percent out of. Airline baggage tracking has actually gotten a lot better over the past few decades. The only time I've had luggage significantly delayed in decades was the result of a canceled international connection which involved being transferred to a different airline. That cost me a fair bit of money and was almost much worse than it was but it was one time.
Most companies are not interested in guaranteeing the transportation of extreme valuables because it's not a service they can profitably provide at a level people are willing to pay for.
In fact if you want to do one better charge a small conveyance fee for the cost of handling it say $10 and the incentives will be ever better aligned with doing a reasonable job.
E.g. in Canada: Air Passenger Protection complaints: https://rppa-appr.ca/file-air-travel-complaint
In Quebec, lawyers aren’t even allowed in small claims courts.
I'd wager most of those items are pre-TSA anyway as they have a pattern of stealing things. Years ago I visited the Microsoft employee store in Redmond where you could buy Xbox games for super cheap. They actually had a sign at the register warning people not to put them in checked bags because they disappeared.
How do you know it's TSA and not the airline's baggage handlers? The latter actually handle your bags a lot more than the former (and do so in places which are not monitored with security cameras).
TSA gets the advantage of seeing inside of the bags on a screen to know which ones to “pull for more inspection”.
I phoned the airline. They had found it. Getting it back was impossible. It was apparently sent to Helsinki, then back to Heathrow in London. The airline just say "we had it sent to London - ask there. We're done."
Fine, but if you go to LHR and ask where the lost property office is, you are met by blank looks. No one knows. There are 5 4?) terminals, all are huge. Someone says there might be something air side in T3, someone else says there might be something near the car park in T5. Others appear to find the very concept of lost property novel and confusing.
I found one place, but they only did lost property for select airlines, and even then it is not open to the public. WTF?
It pushes me off to know that my tablet was sold off to someone despite spending ages schlepping around LHR trying to get it, having been in contact with the original airline and having it sent to London.
I asked if they had received the easyjet report. They almost laughed. Of course they hadn't.
The concierge from my hotel called the next day, and my headphones were reunited on my return to the airport.
Considering the volume of traffic that airport sees I was quite impressed.
Edit: found a website: https://www.kofferauktion24.de/
> Cash only. EC and credit card payments are unfortunately not possible.
Wow, the amounts of cash some of the serious buyers must be arriving with!
[1] https://www.unclaimedbaggage.com/pages/shop
Most of their inventory appears to be comprised of clothing and accessories. I can’t really assess pricing there, but if it’s anything like the pricing for electronics, they’re preying on impulse buyers.
[0]: https://www.unclaimedbaggage.com/products/geforce-gtx-1050-t...
The amount of care taken to price each item depends on whether it can be identified by brand or model. Items without either usually fall into a generic category based on the shape, weight, and ports.
It could be considered "worth it" to dig through every shelf, bin, and table in Electronics for some seriously capable but nondescript tech if there wasn't a pandemic on. The online selection is limited to popular, identifiable items at high prices.
That seems a bit odd, though. While there were undoubtedly some good deals on electronics, the ones I saw were all on sale—which, according to their return policy, apparently also means “all sales final.” Given that a number of those items were high-risk, the price tags were concerning.
For example, they seem to be selling modern, high-end iPhones in the $6XX range. That’s a bit cheaper than buying a stolen iPhone on Let Go, Craigslist, or Facebook Marketplace where I live.
That’s incredibly high risk. At any point, the former owner of the phone may report it lost to their carrier, and the IMEI will be blacklisted. From that point forward, the phone is effectively a brick. It may be useful for parts, but that’s it.
Does the former owner have the right to report it missing, especially if they’ve been compensated? It doesn’t really matter—the point is that they can, and they may even do so inadvertently when they go to buy a new one.
This sounds like a store I’d love to visit in person—so many obscure items that are probably too difficult to price correctly. You’re bound to find a gem eventually. Even if it isn’t worth the time you spend, it’s probably a lot of fun!
But I don’t really think that business model lends itself to eBay. Yes, you can have much wider reach and sell to more people, but your margins are going to be lower. Is it worth it? Maybe if you’re running out of space, but the prices they’re charging for some of the items on their website would have to be significantly reduced if they were to sell those items on eBay.
Maybe I just wasn't looking hard enough, but when I went there a few years ago, it was pretty hard to find anything that was actually a good deal. The vast majority of the store is "normal" stuff (mostly random clothing and books) that's priced about the same as everywhere else, and even the obscure items are surrounded by crowds of people who have already looked over everything.
I don't doubt that if you went enough times, you might eventually find something under-priced, but for the most part it's just a somewhat-overpriced thrift shop (and not particularly fun, IMO).
There were also compelling prices on some Apple Watch accessories and certain videogames, but others had ridiculous prices.
(Edit: misread)
> If you’ve ever permanently lost a checked bag, your stuff probably ended up for sale at a store in Scottsboro, Alabama.
Post-edit reply: again, this article is about a store in Alabama, not Arizona.
Relatively recently (I don't go over there often), the store has had a small selection of firearms, I assume from lost checked luggage.
As an aside, you know those knives and such confiscated at airport security? States sell them. There is a warehouse in Austin with a bunch of related stuff, including collectible knives if you're interested in such things. It also disposes of retired state office furniture and things like what the GSA sells for the federales at gsaauctions.gov.
Meaning if I buy a rare musical instrument from this unclaimed baggage company, I have to live with the possibility forever that someone else might show up at my door with a sheriff and take my musical instrument because they were the original owner?