I have had things magically disappear from my secured/locked checked bags. My boss too. Jewelry, Gerber and Swiss Army multitools, etc.
My boss had her late mother’s earrings very carefully and surgically extracted out of her locked, checked bag on a well-known airline that I will not name here. Her bag looked completely untampered with, and she only found out when she got home to unpack.
Here is what probably happened:
Really pisses me off. But this hard lesson, learned years ago, has prevented me from taking anything that I really want to keep, on a flight.
It’s one of the many reasons I prefer driving if I am not in a hurry to travel, even if it’s a thousand miles of road.
