Each Friday, we feature a reader-inspired tip as our Travel Tip of the Day. This Friday, with the pandemic still wreaking havoc, I thought I’d share a cool piece of news for all the travel-lovers stuck at home. Unclaimed Baggage, the “country’s only merchant of unclaimed and lost airline baggage and its contents,” has made its thousands and thousands of treasures available online.
Prior to this week, you had to travel to Unclaimed Baggage’s 50,000-square-foot facility in Scottsboro, Alabama, to peruse and buy items from its unique inventory. If you’re wondering, it works like this: If a bag is lost by an airline, the airline generally tries to return the bag to its owner for three months. After that, its owner is compensated and the bag and its contents make their way to Unclaimed Baggage, which puts them up for sale. According to Unclaimed Baggage, only about 0.03% of all passenger bags meet this fate.
I almost visited the Scottsboro store a couple of years again when I was in Alabama for a TBEX conference (Unclaimed Baggage even wrote about me on its website!). It was over an hour away from where I was in Alabama as it’s in the boondocks, so I didn’t make it. Well, thanks to COVID-19 the company has had to pivot by putting the contents of unclaimed luggage online, letting us all browse from home. The deals I’ve seen so far aren’t that great, but who knows? You might find something that once belonged to you!
More on how Unclaimed Baggage handles unclaimed luggage
One of my writers visited and wrote about the Scottsboro store and how it all works back in 2009. Read her story here.
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I have been to Unclaimed Baggage in Scottsboro, Alabama several times. I did not very many bargains.