Picture the scene, you turn up at the baggage reclaim to find your items scattered across the moving belt, repeatedly doing a revolving circuit for all to see.
An embarrassing and potentially expensive travel nightmare, bags that break, split or spring forth their contents in transit could see your smalls go on show or worse still, your precious belongings lost and gone forever.
Thanks to a r/travel subthread on Reddit, passengers are being given top-notch information by the people who matter the most when it comes to luggage.
A Redditor by the name of ‘Cleric1372’ shared a post entitled “Luggage advice from a Baggage Handler” in which they offered up some of their very best advice.
Spending every day dealing with badly packed bags and mismanaged luggage, passengers would be wise to heed their advice before they jet away this autumn.
As experts in the luggage field, the poster was able to say with some authority what passengers should consider when they are packing for the airport.
The poster said: “Do not over-stuff your bags! 9/10 these are the bags that get to baggage claim completely exploded, cheap zippers, crappy quality fabric and the overstuffed bag is just a ticking time bomb for all of your belonging to go flying everywhere.”
They also added: “Don’t pack things in the front zipper of your bag.” Explaining why, the poster said: “The items create a bulge on the front of the bag and quickly become a point for the bag to get caught on different surfaces, usually causing the whole front zippered pocket to tear open.”
Another warning involves not the bag or the suitcase, but the quality of the zipper that should keep it shut tight.
The post said: “Zippers! Cheap zippers will eventually leave you with your clothing in the belly of a 737 scattered everywhere, and the baggage handler will try and scoop it up and place it back into the bag, but at that point, your clothes could smell like fish/dog urine/anything in that cargo hold that smells, or covered in a light dusting of the aluminium floors that get rubbed off during all of the friction of loading and unloading cargo and baggage.”
When it comes to locks, the poster added: “Locks – Use a TSA lock on your zippers, it won’t completely thwart theft, but it might prevent the zippers from catching something, coming apart and having contents visible or coming out of the bag.
Finally, they said: “DO NOT USE ZIP TIES or LOCKS in the event that you have zip ties or non-TSA locks and TSA has to get in your bags, they will not cut the zips or locks until they can contact you, possibly leaving the bag off the flight.”