AirTag to the rescue…again. After mishandling her luggage on an American Airlines flight, a woman tracked her lost baggage to a homeless encampment in Hollywood where she made a very unsettling discovery.
Lost Luggage On American Airlines Turns Up In Homeless Encampment
Aunny Grace was traveling from Dallas (DFW) to Hollywood Burbank Airport (BUR) in Southern California and checked her bag. Her flight was significantly delayed and she spent the night sleeping in the terminal before finally making it home a day later. But her bag never made it..it was left behind, with America Airlines promising they would deliver it (once it was located…).
Grace had placed an Apple AirTag in her bag (something I do as well if I have to check a bag…) and noticed that it did finally show up at BUR. Five days later.
A ground handler for AA brought a bag to her house…but it was the wrong one. Her AirTag now indicated her bag was in Hollywood.
So she went out to look for it…and that took her right to a notorious Hollywood homeless encampment. There she found her bag had been ransacked, with toiletries poured out and jewelry and medicine gone.
She also noticed several other bags with AA tags.
American Airlines has offered her $1,700 for her lost belongings. She wants $6,300 and has filed a police report
Luggage Theft Is Easy
Outside of New York York LaGuardia (LGA), I cannot recall a single airport in the USA that compares baggage tags with baggage claim receipts (a laborious and inefficient process, to be sure). Sure, there tend to be CCTV cameras in these areas, but what difference does it make to a homeless person who lives on the street?
There is no easy fix: it is not practical to hire extra labor to monitor this and a passenger cannot be expected to be at the luggage carousel before her bag arrives, especially if it is delayed and arrives on another flight.
It would not surprise me to see this problem increase…it’s just too easy right now. The baggage belt AA uses at BUR is partially outdoors and at the airport entrance: anyone can walk up to it from the street.
In this case, I hope that BUR reviews its security footage and if it is the case that vagrants are just waltzing into the terminal and stealing bags, perhaps a security guard of some kind would help matters.
CONCLUSION
A woman tracked her lost baggage on American AIrlines to a homeless camp in Hollywood. While her AirTag helped to locate her bag, they did not help locate the contents she says were missing from the bag. Now she’s fighting American Airlines for compensation, with the two seemingly far apart on a figure.
It always baffles me that baggage claim is publicly accessible in US airports and anyone can simply enter the airport and get to the carousels.
While it wouldn’t end luggage theft, making the baggage claim accessible only to departing passengers would certainly make it harder.
You’re quite right, but the infrastructure in the USA is just not set up to accommodate that.
That’s true, but when the order to restrict access to the gate areas came, somehow they were able to manage. (And ended up with terrible terminal layouts, but that’s another story…)
Do newly-built terminals have a restricted baggage claim area, or at least are set-up in a way that would be easy to restrict this area? Would be a start.
I just flew into AWR and saw a homeless person walk in from outside and stand by the Luggage carousel. Until finally, one of the other passengers asked him what he was doing there and he left. I have had my luggage Stolen off the carousel at Newark so I was really upset to see that this person walked right past airport employees and nobody said anything
Even worse in PHL where homeless basically live in the baggage claim area since bathrooms are right there for them. And security turns a blind eye to them. Very easy for them to pick a tag to steal as well.
As a former Philly resident, it was one reason I was quite happy to leave the city…and that was a decade ago.
@Matthew – I don’t disagree that Philly has a homeless problem, but it’s not like Santa Monica, LA, San Diego, and San Fran don’t. And I’m not trying to pick on California – any major American city does.
Sorry to burst your bubble Dave, but Philly has cleared the homeless out of PHL.
…they moved to Logan
Yes true. But at least they’re in a part of the terminal that isn’t heavily trafficked. Terminal E baggage claims are all either behind CBP or all the way on the opposite side of where the migrants are kept. Not supporting the idea of keeping them there or letting them in, in the first place, but it could be worse…
Logan is full of illegal migrants. No room at the inn for homeless.
I never check bags when traveling within the US. If I really need something bulky with me that I can’t bring on board, I ship it to my destination with Fedex/UPS in advance (their service has also gone downhill but that’s another story). I simply don’t trust the system. I rarely check bags when flying internationally but when I do I have AirTags on every piece I check.
Now, who checks over $6k in value inside a bag? Jewelry? Are people that stupid? If the homeless guys want my dirty laundry, be my guest but there won’t be anything interesting for them in any of my checked luggage.
You have to wonder about that. It boggles my mind that anyone would put jewelry in a checked bag.
We have had this discussion before. There’s no shortage of suitcases costing 4-figure sums, €300 Balmain t-shirts, YSL jeans that are even more, handmade shoes just shy of $1000, Luis Vuitton handbags in the thousands…heck, there’s even fragrance that goes for $250+ a bottle. There’s a substantial number of people the cost of whose checked in bags plus contents will easily go into five figures without the need to carry any jewelry or electronics. A proportion of these people will just be very wealthy, others will just be ordinary working people who enjoy high-quality stuff and/or have a bit of an obsession with certain brands (I have a few friends like that, including two or three gay guys who always dress impeccably- and being child-free also helps them with disposable income).
Those in the latter group really, REALLY need to purchase adequate travel insurance, because the Montréal compensation limit doesn’t come anywhere close to the value of their stuff and relying on airtags or visiting questionable neighbourhoods to retrieve one’s possessions won’t always end well.
Agree with high end stuff, but jewelry? Who is stupid enough to put jewelry in their checked bags?
But does it matter in that sort of context? That LV bag is easily worth more than a diamond ring!
It matters because unless they are carrying a crown, jewelry is easy to have in a backpack or pockets. Also, many stupid thieves won’t pay much attention to the value of high end clothing or bags but jewelry is always jewelry. Stupid people only put jewelry on checked bags.
Exactly what I was going to say.
Quite frankly, if someone spends $4000 on a bag that cost about $400 to make, they can literally afford to have it stolen and become some homeless person’s change bag.
Manufacturing cost is probably more like $70 than $400. I just purchased a couple of linen scarves from a ‘premium’ (but not super high end) Spanish designer brand, ‘reduced’ to about £30 each from maybe twice that. They were advertised as ‘European linen’ so I thought I can justify the £30 price tag because there wouldn’t be any sweatshops involved. Not only did the labels say ‘Designed in Spain, made in India’, the actual design was literally a piece of thick linen cloth with an embroidered logo- no other details, sewing etc whatsoever. Needless to say, I won’t be rushing to buy anything else from them, but they have a huge following and their fans pay serious money for their clothing etc. Same story with many other expensive brands- people just buy into a story without worrying too much about the actual stuff they purchase. Equally, however, I don’t think we can judge them for that.
I judge them and here’s why:
The people who blow this money on such stuff are, I found, usually unethical in ways to get the money to pay for it: They’re unscrupulous employers or they are married to someone who exploits someone else. Generally, if someone has earned an honest living usually working hard, they won’t squander their wealth on frivolities in a pissing contest with others although, there are exceptions such as the working poor who waste their money in this way but then it’s difficult to pity them.
It is also just as easy for someone who is not homeless to target easy baggage claim locations, take the desired items and then drop it off at the encampment.
Air tags are well known and only fools would now hold onto more than what they can easily pawn.
Just a thought. (Even if less probably than what is assumed went down.)
It’s possible. I’d love to see the security footage.
LAX did baggage claim checks for years up until around 2000 (not sure when it stopped exactly). It was a bit chaotic sometimes and less than precise. But I imagine it curbed a great deal of theft.
When I was a kid (a long time ago…in the 1970’s and 1980’s), you had to show your claim check to an airport or maybe it was an airline employee before leaving baggage claim in order to make sure you had the correct luggage. This was the case at every airport I can remember traveling to.
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