After 23 calls to Air France and over 2.5 hours on the phone with them, I took matters into my own hands and bought a flight to Madrid to try and get my checked bag back.
It took me many days to panic.
When I arrived in Tenerife, waiting by the luggage carousel as the bags and people dwindled, I had no idea what the next weeks would bring. I opened the Find My app to look for the location of the Air Tags I have in each of my bags. My 21 kg backpacking backpack was still in Paris–it never made it on my direct Air France flight, even though I’d checked in at the airport with plenty of time.
My bag was one of the 115,000 pieces of luggage Air France handles every day at their hub, Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport (CDG). CDG consistently ranks as one of the worst airports for mishandled bags, and 16% of bags are mishandled due to a failure to load, according to the International Air Transport Association.
No big deal. I walked over to the luggage counter and got my Property Irregularity Report (PIR), the document you receive in the event of lost, delayed, or damaged baggage. I would come to memorize the file number.
My carry-on suitcase was packed with the clothes I thought I’d use most in Tenerife, so I had most of what I needed. I called Air France and was told my bag was on its way: they were routing it through Madrid.
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The following day, I checked the Find My app again, expecting to see the boot emoji that represented my bag now safely on the island. Instead, it was at the Madrid airport, over 1,000 miles away. I called Air France.
“We don’t know where the bag is,” they said.
“It’s at Adolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas Airport (MAD), Terminal 4,” I told them, “I can send you the exact location.”
Air France said there was nowhere I could send the location; I just needed to wait. In their system, they did not have the bag as in Madrid.
In November, 15 airlines announced they would partner with Apple to begin to accept Find My locations in select airports, including Air France’s fellow Air France-KLM group member KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. Unfortunately, this didn’t help me.
For every 100 delayed bags, Air France says 90 will be reclaimed the next day, and in most cases, the remainder will be reclaimed within 5 days. That wasn’t the case for me.
Playing by the Rules
Every day for the next nine days, I called Air France multiple times a day. Air France made me feel like I was the one at fault and that my calling them was a huge inconvenience. I would ask, “Can you please follow up with the Madrid airport to see if they’ve found the bag?” “No,” they’d reply, “we won’t follow up with them for 72 hours.”
I had friends call in French; they got more helpful agents. “Air France says you need to update your address. You told them you’d only be in Tenerife for 10 days. They might send your bag back to the U.S.”
I’ve been a digital nomad for the last five years. In 2019, I sold most of my stuff and downsized my life into two suitcases, one of which was now missing. That bag had a letter from my father, who passed away in November 2022. It had my physical U.S. SIM card in case my phone and its eSIM were stolen. It had my cold weather and hiking gear, my bathing suits, the Farm Rio dress I bought in Brazil, and the hand embroidered button-down I bought in Oaxaca. Items that took a lifetime to curate. Every woman knows the struggle of finding things that fit you well and that you love. Imagine all your favorite items in one place, now gone.
What if I didn’t get the bag back? I didn’t know if I could continue my travels without it. My next destinations were Albania, Romania, Kenya, South Africa, and Namibia. The next five months were booked and paid for. Without my bag, could I go through with my plans?
When your luggage is missing, the airline will pay a certain amount per day for necessities. But how much and what is a “necessity” isn’t clear. I didn’t want to buy anything. Everything I needed was in my bag, and those items couldn’t be easily replaced in Tenerife. Eventually, I bought a few things in the hopes that it would encourage Air France to look for my bag.
I was worried Air France wouldn’t reimburse me. Those fears were founded: Air France only refunded me $100, giving no reason why they denied the rest of my claim.
I checked Find My multiple times a day. It was an obsession. The Air Tag battery was low. What if it died? I was getting desperate. I started looking for emails and other phone numbers to try. I contacted Air France’s luggage handlers in Madrid, Ground Force. I contacted the lost and found at the Madrid airport. I wrote in every group I was a part of, asking if anyone knew anyone who worked for Ground Force or Air France. Someone sent me the email address of Air France’s CEO, and I emailed her. I sent a detailed description of my bag, photos of it, and the exact Air Tag location. I started posting on X, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
I figured if just one person was kind enough to go out of their way and physically look for the bag, all this would be over.
Taking Matters Into My Own Hands
Then, my bag moved. I watched it in real-time. At first, I was excited. This turned to dread: it looked like the bag was leaving the airport. Maybe posting the bag’s exact location on Twitter had been the worst idea ever. Was it being stolen?
I called Air France for the 23rd time. “We don’t know where the bag is,” they told me. “Wait.”
I’m not the most patient gal. So, I booked a roundtrip flight to Madrid on RyanAir. The cheapest ticket I could find was $118.61. I checked Find My again. The bag was back at MAD—now at Terminal 1. Relief. Unless someone had stolen my bag, emptied all the contents, and brought the Air Tag back to the airport, it wasn’t stolen.
I figured, worst case, my bag and I would cross paths mid-air. Best case, we’d be reunited. Turns out there was another option. RyanAir uses MAD Terminal 1. I arrived in Madrid and immediately checked Find My. Exiting my flight, I could literally see the location of my bag, according to the Air Tag. It looked like it was in a van or one of the large, covered bins where luggage is moved around. I immediately told an airport employee on the jetway my crazy story. She told me to go through proper channels, of course.
I called Air France. “We don’t know where the bag is.”
How could the bag have moved terminals, and still no one had scanned it?!
I located the Ground Force office and found a sympathetic employee who took photos of the Air Tag location and sent them to his colleague. He assured me she would find my bag.
Two hours later, he signaled me. “She can’t find it,” he said.
I could feel the tears coming. I told him about the letter from my father. He said they’d look again but quickly came back and told me it wasn’t there. Of course, he wouldn’t let me into the secure area. Ground Force wouldn’t let me send them screenshots of the location directly.
He told me there was an underground system that moved bags between terminals. Maybe it was stuck there. I asked how often people go down there or if someone could go down there and check. He shrugged. At the time, I didn’t know that MAD misplaces more suitcases than any other European airport.
According to Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas Airport, they know where bags are “99.99%” of the time, thanks to their Sistema Automatizado de Tratamiento de Equipajes (Automated Baggage Handling System). Lucky me, I was in the 0.01%.
It hadn’t occurred to me that I could fly all the way to Madrid and come back without my bag.
I called my friends. They Venmo’ed me money for drinks and sent me to a cute wine bar where the kind bartender commiserated with me. Eyes swollen from crying, I went to bed, determined to return in the morning.
The next day, I talked to half a dozen airport employees, the AENA staff who manage MAD, and the police. I even sweet-talked my way into a different baggage claim area. No dice. Defeated, I boarded my flight back to Tenerife.
Next Steps
It was time to face facts: I might not get my bag back. I spent hours creating a bag inventory, looking for receipts for items I’d purchased ten years ago, and assessing their value.
It was several thousand dollars more than the €1,607 the Montreal Convention stipulated Air France would need to pay if my bag was still lost after 21 days, assuming I could produce receipts for the lost items.
It took me many more hours to enter the bag inventory into the clunky, dial-up-internet-style World Tracer application. This is how Air France would determine if and how much of the €1,607 they’d pay me.
The form only had nine lines for bag inventory. I figured out I had to click “add more” rows, then put the item in, then “save,” then refresh the page. This took me back to the start of the application, where I clicked through seven screens; the next arrow was in a different place on each of them. I did that 83 times. I went to file an insurance claim with my travel insurance, SafetyWing; they would pay up to $3,000 for the items in the lost bag (with receipts of course).
Turns out, my automatically renewing travel insurance had expired four days before my flight because SafetyWing had just ended their partnership with World Trips. Apparently, they had sent me four emails saying I needed to manually renew my insurance—the first only five days before my existing policy was now going to expire, and none of which I saw since they all went to my promo/update tab in Gmail. So the bag wasn’t covered.
A Happy Ending?
I’d given up hope. “It’s just stuff,” I told myself. “It’s ok.”
And then, for the first time, Air France contacted me.
“We have your bag,” they said. I jumped up and down.
It still took a while to get it. Air France sent it to Tenerife North Airport, where they didn’t have any employees. So, instead of bringing the bag to me directly, they first had to send it to Tenerife South Airport. Seventeen days later, my bag was back in my arms. I cried tears of relief this time.
I will never again voluntarily check a bag. I will make sure my Air Tags have battery before a flight. According to Air France, incidents that can cause a bag to be delayed include connections that are too short, weather disruptions (snow, storms, etc.), and the identification tag being ripped off in the sorter.
Make sure you have travel insurance that covers delayed and lost baggage; you might have coverage through the credit card you use to book the flight. Take pictures of your bag and take pictures of its contents. If you can, keep a bag inventory with the item description, brand, price, link to the product, and a receipt for purchasing it.
The likelihood of your bag being lost is low. Air France says their bag success rate is 99%. There’s actually been a 9.2% year-on-year decrease in the rate of mishandled bags, according to SITA, with 6.9 bags per 1,000 passengers being mishandled.
I won’t be flying Air France again if I can help it. But may the odds be ever in your favor.
