Luggage logic: choosing and using bags with care help ensure you'll have something to wear when you get there - Brief Article

Cruise Travel, March-April, 2002

While searching for your baggage at a cruise dock, or an airport carousel, have you bothered to notice how many bags look alike? And did you ever think of problems look-alike luggage can cause?

We didn't when we began cruising years ago, but we learned in a hurry. We were watching the carousel at the Tampa airport after flying in from Miami, where our Caribbean cruise had ended. Round and round the carousel went, as we looked and looked at a dozen bags, all twins of ours.

Finally we snatched three of our four bags. Then the baggage-mover stopped. The signal light went off. No more baggage from our flight. We were minus one bag. We reported the missing item to the airline, picked up our car, and headed home for Inverness, 60 miles to the north.

Two days later, we got a call from the airline. Our bag had turned up. It hadn't been lost. Just purloined by some woman who thought it was hers. Normally, it would have been the airline's responsibility to deliver our bag, but not in this case. The airline hadn't lost the bag. The woman had taken it without bothering to check it until she got home 50 miles south in Sarasota.

We could have paid a steep price to have the bag shipped to us. Instead we picked it up on an infrequent shopping trip to Tampa. We thus accomplished two projects with the 220-mile roundtrip.

That experience taught us a lesson. Simple beg tags are dangerous. They aren't distinctive enough. Immediately we established a definite identification system. We can spot our luggage at a hundred paces, and 99 percent of the time no one will mistakenly grab our luggage.

Why? Because the bags are so vividly marked. I mark them with H letters with international orange paint and tape. In addition, there are orange markings on top and at each end of each bag. Pretty? No way. Easily seen? You bet. We figured it was foolproof, but there's always an exception to any rule.

We call this rule-breaking incident the case of disappearing/reappearing baggage. We docked at Port Manatee, south of Tampa on the Florida Gulf Coast. Debarkation went smoothly. We easily spotted three of our bags, but one was missing. In a short time 80 percent of the bags had been claimed.

Bea made two searches finding nothing. Then I went scouting. Twice I found zilch. It was perplexing. Luggage can't walk, and why would anyone want our orange-labeled bags?

I tried once more. To my surprise, in an area I'd checked only 15 minutes before, I found our bag sitting primly alone in the now almost empty hangar. Had we missed it four times? No chance! Neither of us had overlooked it--it was not in the baggage area when we searched.

Finally we had our bag, but only a theory as to what happened. Apparently, despite our gaudy markings, someone had taken our bag, then belatedly realized the mistake and brought it back. It was not in the original "H" baggage area.

In all of our cruising experiences, we've had two major problems with soft-side luggage. Years ago, while embarking on a Trinidad cruise, Bea's large, soft-side bag was bashed in such a manner that the zipper could move only part way. You can imagine the fun she had unpacking and re-packing with a bag opening only a few inches.

But our worst experience happened recently in the Tampa airport after returning from a deep Caribbean cruise to Aruba. Waiting at the carousel, we saw a new, green soft-side bag slide onto the turntable. It was battered and torn. We watched in amazement as it finally came opposite of us. It was ours--new on its first and last cruise.

We snatched it, and surveyed the damage. The top, main zipper was intact, but the bag had been battered so hard that the cloth was ripped and torn. Two-thirds of the top was badly twisted, and the contents a mess. It was the airline's fault, and we were reimbursed for the bag after we provided photographic evidence.

We've never been too enthusiastic about soft-side luggage. It's vulnerable to damage, and offers little protection against thieves with sharp knives. We've encountered people in Brazil who had this misfortune. And on a more recent cruise's sailing day, we saw someone's battered, soft-side bag delivered outside a cabin on our deck. But those bags do have a weight advantage over the hard-side kind.

We've been forced to compromise on the use of soft-siders. For years we had two relatively small, Samsonite, hard-side two-suiters, which offered maximum protection with minimum weight. These bags were better than modern ones. They also had full-size, cloth curtains, anchored at the bottom inside, which could be fastened with snaps at the top, thus assuring your clothes didn't become a tangled mess; the current systems are inadequate, we used these bags until they became useless. Since then we've been unable to find any moderate-size hard-side replacements.

If you have to hassle with your bags, the weight of current, large-size, hard-siders--fully loaded--is a problem, even with wheels. Soft-siders became practical a few years ago after we flew north to board a fall cruise out of New York. Unfortunately, we landed at Newark, when there were no porters to carry our bags across the terminal to the bus waiting to transport us to the New York pier. That was the last time we used big, hard-side bags.