How to Never Lose a Suitcase and Win an Extra Seat in Your Next Fight

Here I share two short hacks from my best-selling book — Budget Travelers, Digital Nomads & Expats: The Ultimate Guide.

If you are used to budget traveling and giant airports like Heathrow, this will be very useful for you.

1 — How to never lose your suitcase.

During my first international travel, my luggage was just a big, dark-colored, plain bag. We were landing at Ezeiza, Buenos Aires, an airport where baggage carousels are the same for multiple flights and hundreds of bags. Having a bag similar to so many others, I guarantee one thing:

It is not cool to take the luggage of someone by mistake and see the person rushing to you thinking you are stealing!

Those embarrassing situations can be avoided with a simple trick. It will also help others not take your luggage. A single trick to make easier complaining to the airline if you missed your bag and answer when they ask you if there was any detail to easily identify your luggage.

Put a big sticker on it!

It can be one of your favorite destinations, or of your garage band, or just some random abstract pattern.

This will work very well if the material of your luggage is hard, like acrylic or plastic. But if it is made of fabric, then a sticker may not stick long enough. In this case, the best recommendation is to just buy a bag with some shocking, weird, or fluorescent color.

It may not look perfect to an Instagram photo but will save you time and avoid losing your stuff in those ever-growing airports.

2 — Have 3 seats by booking just 2.

In my last trip back from South America to Europe, my wife and I still had two flights separating us from home. The first was more than 12 hours long, and we really could use some extra space to stretch our legs while watching a movie.

In those situations, everyone’s fear is a quarterback-sized man sitting at your row and squeezing you like a toothpaste. For a 12 hour flight, this is a spooky panorama.

My wife is more of a windowed passenger, while I prefer the aisle. This is when we came with a simple and very intuitive idea: One of us choose the window and the other the aisle, in the same row. In a not-so-crowded flight, it was unlikely someone would select the middle-seat with so many others available.

This is not a guaranteed hack because if the airplane is almost full, someone may just choose whatever is free, even if it is the middle seat between you and your partner.

However, virtually all the times I made this in not-so-crowded flights, it worked well.

Have a great (and inexpensive) trip!

Author: Levi Borba, founder of Colligere Expat Consultancy, former RM specialist for the world´s greatest airline, author of the books Moving Out, Living Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity and Budget Travelers, Digital Nomads & Expats: The Ultimate Guide. You can check some of his articles here.

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