A couple in Ontario was stunned to learn that their airport luggage had been donated to charity after Air Canada misplaced it. The couple says they put an AirTag in their luggage to keep track of it as it moved through the airport, but that they were unable to retrieve their bags when they got to their destination in Toronto after a short layover in Montreal.
Nakita Rees, a dancer and choreographer, told her followers on social media that her bag arrived in Toronto with her but her husband’s bag was missing. They filed a missing bag report and watched on the AirTag as the luggage was placed in a storage facility in Montreal. Then, something extremely bizarre happened.
AirCanada Donates Bag to Charity
Rees explains that she and her husband watched on their tracker as the bag was shipped from Montreal to a facility in Etobicoke. “We got really excited because we’re like ‘Oh it’s coming back to Toronto, it’s going to go to a processing facility, this is awesome,’” Rees says. However, the luggage then stayed at this processing facility for over three months as the couple waited anxiously to retrieve their belongings.
Rees says AirCanada “compensated” them for the clothing in the luggage by sending roughly a quarter of the garments’ value in a direct transfer that she had no option to decline. Finally, Rees got the police involved and found out that their luggage was donated to charity by AirCanada. “[T]hey deemed it lost even though we were tracking our luggage last for the last four months,” Rees noted. “It was never actually truly lost because we know where it was the entire time.”
Selling “Lost” Luggage
Donating the items to charity is also far from the only thing that airlines do with lost luggage. You can buy lost items online ranging from electronics to designer clothing–all of which were supposed to travel with customers of various airlines before getting lost in the shuffle between planes.
You can visit Unclaimed Baggage’s website to shop for such items. The popular Alabama-based retailer recently created an online platform for its stock of, well, unclaimed baggage. The company buys lost luggage from airlines after they’ve passed the 90-day return window and then resells the items found within at its retail location in Scottsboro or through its website. Just keep that in mind the next time you plan to check a bag on a long flight!
