Put pieces of paper in your suitcase? With this paper trick you can get your lost luggage back while traveling by plane

Brilliant travel hack for the summer holidaysFor less stress on vacation! Why you shouldn’t travel without a note in your suitcase

Simply put a piece of paper in your suitcase – safer than any luggage tag!

Every year, countless pieces of luggage go missing during air travel, and the chaos is enormous. As data from the online statistics platform Statista shows, there were 6.9 misdirected pieces of luggage per thousand passengers worldwide in 2023. For those affected, the loss of a suitcase primarily means a lot of stress: the piece of luggage has to be reported as missing to Lost and Found, travelers have to spend valuable vacation days without luggage and, in the worst case, the suitcase ends up being considered missing entirely.

But there are ways and means to prevent the worst case scenario. Sure, we all know classic luggage tags that are attached to the outside of the luggage, and every suitcase is given a band with a barcode when checking in.

But do you already know the trick with the big piece of paper inside the suitcase? While tags located on the outside can quickly be torn off, even the roughest treatment in the handling department cannot harm the note.

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“Secondary Tracing”: THIS is how the piece of paper hack in your luggage works

The airline passenger rights portal Planeclaim explains exactly how the note trick works in a video that was shared on the company’s TikTok page last year.

Take a large piece of paper (for example DIN A4 or DIN A5). Write your name, email address and phone number on it. Once the suitcase is fully packed, place the note inside where it is clearly visible and then lock the luggage securely.

The note inside increases the likelihood “that your luggage will come back to you”. The reason: If the suitcase cannot be assigned when it is closed, it is usually opened to carry out the so-called “secondary tracing”. This process is not always successful, says Planeclaim. In this case, the luggage will either be auctioned or destroyed.

If the airport employees now find the piece of paper with your contact details in the suitcase, it makes the assignment much easier – worst case scenario averted.

What exactly is secondary tracing? If you lose your luggage, you must report what your suitcase looks like and what it contains when reporting to Lost and Found. This is important not only in order to determine the possible amount of damage, but also in order to be able to assign a suitcase. It happens that a suitcase is opened for the purpose of allocation and the actual contents are compared with the described contents.

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