Well, yeah, but I lock my doors at night, even though my windows wouldn’t survive a blow from those very same pliers. The locks are meant to discourage sneak thieves, not determined criminals. However, I don’t bother with the locks either, and instead just have really old and dingy luggage.
Of course, the TSA would then blame the missing items on the airline, who would blame it on the TSA, and back and forth ad infinitum with you no better off.
I haven’t flown in a number of years. So now my old but perfectly serviceable luggage can be legally vandalized by the TSA and the only way to avoid this is to buy new luggage? Can I send the TSA the bill for my new luggage? (I know I can’t but it seems like I should be able to.)
That’s why I just put exploding die packs in all of my luggage. You see this way …
Oh, sorry, they said the time is up on my one phone call, gotta go …
Sure they can, but a luggage thief is likely looking for the quick and easy score. If he can’t open your lock, he’ll likely just move on to another bag. He’s not going to want to take the time to undo and redo your zipper when there’s hundreds of other bags which can be locked/unlocked with no effort.
Agreed, but at least you would have a more convincing case with the police, airlines and insurance if you could prove that your item was in the bag in the first place. Plus, if the routing tag specified that it should be X-Rayed on arrival, it might deter some thieves since they there would be a better chance the loss would be investigated.
How do airlines handle theft anyway? If something was stolen from my bag, I wouldn’t realize the theft until many hours or even days later when I unpacked it. The airlines would need to be justifiably cautious handling claims or else it would easily be abused.
There’s almost no effort involved using the pen trick and that is, indeed, how some/many thieves do it.
True, that is pretty easy to get into the zippers. One way to defeat that would be to lock the zippers clasps together to something fixed on the suitcase rather than to just each other so the clasps couldn’t move. If the thief pries open the zipper, they wouldn’t be able to zip it back up.
Not all cases use zippers. For the hard cases which are padlocked, jamming the master hole would make it more unlikely a thief could get in. I suppose if you did that, it might be a good idea to put an extra lock inside the case with a note like “TSA, use this lock to relock the case.”
Where are you from? I’ve not been to The Land of the Free™ for years, but even I knew about this.