Many old cartoons sometimes show suitcases with “paris” “japan”, etc. stickers on them to show that a character has been around the world or whatever- is there a real world basis for this? Did they really used to do this? If so, when, and why did they stop?
Yes, steamship companies and travel companies used to provide them.
Some examples.
I’m old enough to have been on long ocean voyages, between Britain and Australia, and remember them sticking those labels on your baggage, especially the bags that were going into the hold (that you wouldn’t be able to get to easily during the voyage). For most people, the cabins were too small to contain all the bags you were traveling with. (Think of the cabin that the Marx Brothers were in, in A Night at the Opera). They stopped using them so much when people stopped travelling by ship and started travelling by air.
Back when I was travelling overseas more than I do now, I picked up a few country stickers to put on my luggage. I never had more than one or two on any one piece of luggage, but it did make the luggage distinctive.
I think the modern day version is to leave the airport tags on your luggage. I have three on mine. And that took 30 years to accumulate ( I hate to travel).
That’s a good way to send your bags on a vacation different than the one you’re taking. Won’t be much of a vacation for them - they simply might go back to an airport you were at in the past, rather than some place that’s new and fun.
People who left the stickers on their luggage are the same types that leave lift passes on their jackets: dorks who want to show off where they’ve been and what they’ve been doing.
Oh, my. My family wasn’t affluent enough to travel around the world when I was a kid, but we did drive around the United States, and I lived to collect decals from new states and apply them to my suitcase. We used to buy them at Stuckey’s and other high-class travel emporia.
People stopped doing this because . . . well, partly because travel became cheaper, and advertising that you’d been to Kansas or even Paris seemed kind of, ah . . . tacky. But mostly they stopped because suitcases changed–they’re made of lighter, more natural fabrics now and you couldn’t apply a decal or sticker even if you wanted to.
My mother still has her mother’s trunk from the overseas trips that she took in the 1930s. The trunk is festooned with those labels.
My red wheeled suitcase has a fluorescent orange “Qantas Security” sticker on it from my trip to Australia last year. It looks tacky, but it makes it easier to pick out my bag on a baggage claim carousel, so I don’t plan to take it off. It has stayed there through quite a few trips, so obviously someone’s figured out how to get a sticker to stick to a modern suitcase.
My passport has a “Virgin Security” sticker on the outside of the back cover, put there when I was leaving for my honeymoon 