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Illustration by Catherine Chan
I like to check my bag. I’m not sure why. I like the freedom of roaming around the airport without lugging a suitcase behind me. I don’t like the hassle of battling for space in the overhead bins or wondering whether my bag will fit on the smaller planes which fly into smaller airports. I don’t enjoy having to take out liquids and gels when I go through security. I want to use my precious legroom for my legs, not a suitcase. Checking a bag for a short trip seems to have become something of an anachronism, like using a physical keyboard on a phone or getting the newspaper delivered to your house (I do both).
I’m not sure what happens to my checked bag after it disappears down the conveyor belt, but in recent years it is usually not on the carousel at my destination. Air travel during my recent academic sabbatical has meant I often show up at conferences wearing the same clothes because my checked bag has gone on its own journey due to delays, cancellations and automated Air Canada itinerary rebookings.
On one occasion during a two night round trip to Birmingham, U.K., my bag showed up at my hotel only after I had returned home to Ottawa, despite me repeatedly informing the airline involved that I would no longer be at that hotel. Only by the grace of one of my U.K., colleagues, who travelled to the hotel and brought the bag back to the airport herself, was my bag received in Ottawa, safe and sound. Five weeks later.
Twice I have arrived at a gate just in time to make my connection, but then told I would not be able to board because my checked bag would not make it. This stings because the policy is not applied consistently. I was forced once to spend an extra night and day in Toronto waiting for the next flight to Florence. All of this was because my initial Ottawa-Toronto flight was delayed over three hours. When I finally arrived in Florence, 20 hours late, was my bag on the carousel? No, it was not.
I bought a T-shirt. I did not receive my bag until I was back home in Ottawa.
Other baffling incidents seem to arise from automated rebookings of my itinerary as a result of one leg of the trip being cancelled. Sometimes I am informed of these, and sometimes not. Once, after travelling west for five hours to Vancouver for a connection to Tokyo, I received an automated message informing me that I had been rebooked to fly from Vancouver back east through Heathrow and then on to Tokyo before catching another plane to Hokkaido.
Did my baggage arrive with me? It did not.
It was winter. I spent my entire time in Hokkaido without my luggage. This justified the purchase of another T-shirt at the Sapporo Beer Museum. Amazingly, Nippon Airways held my bag in Tokyo when it eventually arrived and provided outstanding customer service. On my return flight, an agent waited for me at Haneda airport with my bag.
More recently, when returning from California, a cancelled last leg Toronto-Ottawa flight resulted in a last-minute rebooking through Los Angeles International. So I had an extra eight hours in Monterey airport. As much as I love this small airport (Woody’s has a great beet salad and a delicious Mai Tai IPA), there is not much to do. As we were finally boarding, the pilot barrelled down the jet bridge calling, “Ground delays at LAX. Everyone off!”
We deplaned and started to figure out how to rebook. The pilot returned and announced that we might be able to take off soon, but that we needed to be ready. We all boarded again in a pandemoniacal whirlwind, zone numbers be damned. At LAX - by sprinting from Terminal 8 to Terminal 6 - I made the red-eye connection to Toronto. Of course, when I landed in Toronto, the new connecting flight - the reason that the whole itinerary had been rebooked in the first place - was now also cancelled. Five hours later I was home. My bag? It did not make it.
Despite all of these hassles, faith in humanity is restored and spirits are raised through the words and actions of individuals: the colleague who saved my bag from oblivion in Birmingham; the iPad-toting attendants at Haneda who swarmed me on arrival to ensure I received my bag; the customer service agent at Toronto, who walked me to the hotel shuttle after I was denied boarding; the pilot who did his best to make sure we all made our tight connections at LAX.
These days, I am pleasantly surprised if the bag arrives as scheduled. Friends and family ask, “Why don’t you just do carry on?” I’ve considered it and may give it a try.
But I don’t mind buying new T-shirts and collecting travel stories. As long as I finally receive my luggage a few weeks later at home, I’ll probably keep on checking my bag.
David Bryce lives in Ottawa.