The Luck of the Airtag

We recently returned to Europe. Last year, when we returned, we shipped some things back. We left (what we thought was) plenty of time to receive them before we departed for France and Italy. We were wrong.

The package arrived at customs about three weeks or so before we were to leave. Surely, it will clear in time, we thought. Nope again. I promptly paid the tax (on items we’d already paid tax on in the USA, and at a value equal to almost the same as the value of the contents and shipping itself) and then the package sat. And sat. And sat. And sat. Phone calls, emails and web forms completed, all various forms of contact, all yielding different answers about next steps and timing of our package’s “imminent” arrival.

I went to the post office to try to obtain permission, in advance of our departure, to either redirect the package to our neighbor or for him to collect it. All to no avail. The package was stuck. Somewhere. Somewhere unknown in the bureaucracy of Portuguese customs.

And then, a few weeks after we left for France, we got a notice via email that the package would be delivered shortly, and they would make only two attempts before returning it to the US. Wait, what? I already paid twice the value of the goods and shipping and now it’s going home? Fortunately, we have good neighbors. Our next-door neighbor sprang into action, going to the post office, determining next steps (with much more success than I) and, eventually after one more email from me and one from the sender of the package who shipped it to us after we left, it was safely and securely ensconced in our apartment.

Phew…. and never again.

This time, I had purchased some new golf clubs for our return (another long story) and a large hard-case golf club carrier bag for transport. I was not going to pay tax on them twice this time. We packed clothes, vitamins (we can’t get the kind we like in Portugal), some household goods and some books around them. We lugged the clubs in their carrier across the USA for our five-week road trip. I used them (the clubs) twice in Vermont and in Maine and then carefully repacked them in the box they came in and we shuffled things around to ensure that we did not exceed 70lbs on any bag (the golf club bag was close, but under).

Last fall, our brother-in-law Tim was visiting and talked about friends at his golf course talking about putting an Apple Airtag in any checked bags. He went on and on about what a good idea it was. Then he checked his bag without an Airtag back to Rome and then California and it got lost. Losing a checked bag, if you’ve never done it, results in a sinking feeling. “Will I ever see it again?” and “If so, then when?”. Many years ago, we’d lost luggage en route to a conference in New Orleans at which Melissa was speaking. It was not so long after Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans may have been ready for conferences to return, but the airlines sure weren’t. They were way, way, way overbooked and couldn’t get nearly half of the attendees to the largest Healthcare IT conference in the USA (HIMSS). Upon learning that US Air could get us there only the day after the conference ended, I made a hasty (correct) decision to “just get close” (in this case Mobile, Alabama) and drive. We made it relatively on time to the conference but without any clothes for it. A series of sitcom character names (Rachel Greene, Bart Simpson, etc.) answered our calls for status from Bangalore and offered next to no assistance. No status, no idea where our bags were. They even told us that, at that time anyway, US Airways didn’t actually have a computer system capable of scanning those bar-coded stickers to identify where the bag was, rendering them utterly useless. So, we went shopping, kept every receipt and with dogged persistence, upon our return home, we were reimbursed for all of it. In the end, our bags did make it to New Orleans, probably not that long after we did but customer “service” couldn’t tell us that until we stumbled upon them several days later when we returned to the airport just to see if they were there.

These days, we typically travel light. We carried on one bag and a small carry on when we went to Japan for 17 days. If we check a bag, we carry-on supplies to get us by for a few days without a potentially lost checked bag. This time, since we bring a lot more stuff with us when we return to Portugal, we had four checked bags. All were equipped with an Airtag so I could monitor them as they got put on or taken off of the plane (an imperfect process, but generally functional) and so when we touched down in Lisbon and I was able to get a good signal I knew, right then, that the golf bag was back at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam but the others were resting comfortably in the hold below our feet.

We followed the process (i.e. waited until all bags were out before going to the lost bags desk), then filled out the online form with TAP Airlines and, kudos to them, 24 hours later were reunited with the bag, fully intact. But a lot of the guesswork was removed. I knew my bag had been moved from terminal to gates in Amsterdam the next morning and I knew it had arrived in Lisbon hours before I got an email from TAP. A lot of the angst, ascendant hope and falling despair was removed from the process because of the lucky decision to drop a few Airtags in with our contents. Thank you, Apple and thank you Tim.