Before You Lose Your Lugagge
Photograph your bags
Carrying a digital camera with you on this trip? Take a picture of your bags and leave it on your camera.
Look into Travel Insurance
Consider buying travel insurance to cover lost luggage. While airlines eventually pay up, travel insurance companies often can also help in tracking the lost bags and getting you money to replace items more quickly.
Share an outfit
Traveling with a friend? Pack an outfit in each other's bag. It's less likely that both your bags will go missing.
Pack Your Carry-on
Choose your lightest outfit to pack in your carry-on luggage. If the worst happens, you'll at least have a change of clothes. Too much to carry? At least include a change of underwear, and my favorite multi-purpose travel item, the sarong.
You're Not Secure at Security
With the rush to take off items, unpack laptops, and so on, it's easy to overlook something. Bins get shifted and put out of order ahead of you, and if you are delayed in the metal detector or puff chamber, it's easy for your items to end up in several places.Keep your wits about you, pre-plan what to do at security, and make sure you leave with as many items as you brought. Since you sometimes have to remove items, or take them out of cases, this isn't that easy to keep track of.
Traveling with a friend? Don't fight to stay together in the security line.
It can actually help if one of you gets through several minutes ahead of the other. That way, the first person can gather their own gear and then be ready to help the second person. If you're right together, you're both scrambling to get items at the same instant, and it's easier to overlook something. This is crucial when traveling with cameras and other delicate equipment. The fragile stuff should go through with the second person, so both of you can keep an eye on it. Also, skip the black equipment bags - use bright ones you can spot easily.
Security Checkpoints - Danger Zones!
As I discovered recently, if you leave an item at a security checkpoint and board your plane to another country, there is usually no system in place between airports to help you retrieve such lost items.The connecting airport may offer you a phone number to call - they won't make the call for you as it is international long distance - but that is about it. It's not their problem, it's not the airline's problem, - it's all yours. Even follow-up calls by friends in Greece could not retrieve a much-loved sweater that I had left in a bin at security. At Munich, my connecting airport, airport personnel actually seemed offended that I would dare to lose an item in this way and then dream of reclaiming it.
Mark your bags distinctively - with something that won't come off.
I travel a lot - and I've seen every kind of luggage tag riding around the carousel, long parted from its bag. By all means, use a luggage tag. But back it up with a piece of brightly-colored colored tape on your bag and your name and flight info inside -- it can keep your bag going from misplaced to truly missing.
Know your luggage.
If you just bought a new piece of luggage, stick the price tag - which usually pictures it - into your purse or wallet. For older pieces, carry an index card with your own bad line drawings of what it looks like, along with those impossible-to-remember brand names noted. (My least-favorite baggage manufacturer name, though it was a great bag - "Smuggler". Thank you, I get searched enough.)
Have Free Time at your Connection? Stroll on by the Luggage Carousel Anyway
More than once, I've found my "checked through" bags going around and around on their merry way to nowhere. I've retrieved them and given them to an airline representative or baggage supervisor to be checked back through.Have Your Hotel Information
If you've booked through a service or a group trip, you may not be given the address details of your hotel. Always know the information for your first hotel night after a flight, and have it with you on an index card in your purse or wallet. Why an index card? Paper gets crumpled, shoved down, and lost. Index cards tend to stay put, can't be confused with a business card, and can even be found by feel in dark conditions. That same two-sided index card can carry a surprisingly large amount of other crucial information for your trip.My most controversial tip - keep traveler's checks in your checked bag
We all worry about our checked luggage. But what if it is your purse or wallet that goes missing? And with increased security, even a money belt may be pulled off for X-ray or in secondary search, making it possible to leave it behind. In situations like these, a cache of traveler's checks or even a concealed credit card in your checked luggage could save the rest of your trip.Go on to "After You've Lost Your Luggage"
