[QUOTE=Moonlitherial]
I’ve also noticed that the majority of cases are not plain black anymore.
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Sounds like travelers are finally getting wise. The last time I flew, I thought there must have been a clearance sale on identical black roller bags. My bags are pretty easy to spot as they’re fairly bright blue.
Now the next frontier is laptops. You have no idea how many business travelers have rather identical looking IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads or Dell Latitudes until you go through security. The last time I flew for work, the security mood was for all laptops to be out of their cases and all alone in a bin to go through the xray, so at the other end, there would be an endless string of bins with plain black slabs in them. :eek: Thankfully, I planned ahead and stuck a “p-touch” label with my name on my laptop so it was easy to get the right one.
No, but they’re small. And the luggage is just thrown willy-nilly, so the luggage tags are not always on top, so sometimes you have to turn it to see if it’s yours.
Which is why my braided strings are on both sides.
I stand away from the belt and wait for my large neon green bag to come rolling out, then I step in and grab it. The crowd is fun to watch while waiting.
The last time I bought luggage, there was one choice in colors: black. Every mid-sized black suitcase looks alike to me. Sorry, I’m not a topologist or a luggage connoisseur. They come down the carousel, I grab and check the tag. If I touch your precious suitcase, tough.
I used to have zero problems with my bright red American Tourister. It was one of those that they used to advertise how a 300-pound gorilla couldn’t damage it. Air France could, though. I currently use the same method lots of others do: A length of brightly-colored yarn securely attached to the handle.
They now come in Midnight Blue as well, which looks like black until you get close up to it.
I’m tempted to glitterize my luggage. I’ll be able to tell which one is mine, and I’ll also be able to tell where it’s been, because it’s left a trail of glitter behind it.
My wife paints artistic designs on our bags, in glitter paint.
As a result I have a very nicely stylized “QtM” on my bag, using the the script where the Q resembles a large “2”. Much more impressive than my actual initials.
We can always spot our bags, and noone else ever makes a grab for them.
I had my daughters draw pictures on our luggage with fabric paint. One daughter just drew our last initial, along with stars and diamonds. The other drew a barn scene, complete with a cow and pigs.
It’s not very professional, but it certainly makes it easily identifiable in a luggage carrousel. And I can’t imagine a thief could easily use the “I thought it was mine” defense.
Until some relatives insisted upon buying me some wheeled luggage, I lugged around an old Samsonite with a brown alligator skin pattern. Didn’t have any trouble with that one.
First was a have smallish red & black bag with two wheels and a matching gym bag, which can be zipped together to make one big unit. Then I bought a large, black, shiny, hard plastic unit on four wheels for myself and a large, gray, four-wheeled bag for the lady of the house.
I once felt like an idiot because I waited and waited for my bag to show up. Finally, bags stopped coming out of the shoot and there weren’t many left. I knew one couldn’t be mine because it had a big orange tag on it, but I decided to go ahead and check anyway. Turns out, it was mine. The tag had been added by the baggage handlers.
Weird! The only luggage fairies I’ve ever seen evidence of were TSA agents - and no, this isn’t a bad story. My husband packed a huge roller-duffel bag with a lot of clothing, but since he didn’t have much time to pack and had literally just done laundry, clothes went from the dryer into the bag. We arrived at our destination to find one of those “we had to open this to inspect it” TSA letters - atop a stack of nicely-folded clothing. Thanks, anonymous TSA agent!
The problem is that even if you buy a weird looking suitcase (ours are silver) every so often someone on your flight has also bought the same weird looking suitcase. The size looks very different when it is by itself versus being in a crowd of other bags.
I also use colored shoelaces around the handle and odd luggage tags, which usually does it. Things were tougher when I started flying which was before they put your name on the luggage tag.
Careful! That’s where I store my xmex-like snout when I travel. If you use neutronium-plated tongs when handling the luggage you’ll be fine. Until I’m hungry, anyway.