Update (Monday, 14:30): I got a text message from Schiphol baggage services yesterday evening to say that they had located the bag, and that it would be delivered today. It has just arrived, with a Bucharest airport security sticker on it. All original contents are all present. So, yay!
There was a period of a few years about a decade ago when Abi and I couldn’t take an airplane trip without the airline losing at least one of our bags. We learned valuable lessons about cross-packing (RAID-0 for luggage), so that the loss of any one suitcase would not be asymmetrically disastrous; about always making sure to put a big address & contacts label (A4 paper + marker pen) inside the suitcase in case the luggage tag gets stripped in transit; and about never checking bags in the first damn place.
On our flight home from Dublin this afternoon, we violated all three rules. We’re now waiting to see if my suitcase reappears. After the luggage belt at Schiphol cleared, there was one black rolling suitcase remaining. It wasn’t mine, but it kinda looked like mine, so Schiphol Baggage Services’ operating assumption is that someone mistook it for their own, and that they will make contact once they discover their error. (It will be the only way for them to get their own bag back, after all.)
We didn’t pack any of our critical IT infrastructure items (laptops, iPads, phones) in the bag, but I was the designated carrier of non-essential-yet-heavy-and-not-actually-needed-on-the-flight-itself stuff. I’m curious to see how many of the following items get returned to us:
- Four Apple magsafe laptop chargers
- Four Apple iPad chargers
- Half a dozen Apple lightning & 30-pin cables
- Apple TV (+ charging & HDMI cables), with cached login credentials for various services
- 3TB WD MyBook external hard drive with a copy of all our accumulated video media (hundreds of films and TV shows) (Only a copy. We may be lax with our luggage practices, but never with data integrity.)
- Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200 digital camera, plus camera bag, memory cards, spare battery and charger.
Oh and my clothes and toiletries, too. Whatevs.
The other thing we didn’t do was tie some unmissable and distinctive marker onto the outside of the bag. That, too, will be taken care of in future.