Every year, millions of Americans travel the globe.  We all know by now that when you travel, we need to take some of our belongings with us.  What can make a trip stressful is when you get to your destination and find out that your luggage has been damaged, stolen, or lost.  What makes a passenger even more upset is that an airline can do very little about it.

Every year, thousands of bags are never found again.  Airlines usually do their best in finding the luggage and actually have a pretty decent recovery rate.  If you’re asking yourself what you can do in order to secure your luggage, here are a few tips.

Travel carry-on only.

The title explains it all.  Try and pack everything into a duffle bag and carry it onto the plane yourself.  Most airliners will only allow you to bring two bags onto a plane and they must be a certain size.  Carry-on baggage allows you to know where your bag is at all times.  The only way you can lose your luggage is if you hop off the plane and forget it in the overhead compartment.

Never pack urgent items.

Items like medicine, papers for a presentation, etc should never be thrown in your bag that you’re going to check-in.  It’ll be a lot safer for you to carry these items onto the plane yourself.  If your bags do get lost by chance, you will not want to be stressed out knowing your medicine and papers won’t be in your hands anytime soon.

Put your name tag on your bag.

Believe it or not but a lot of people may have the same bag as you.  Sometimes people will mistakenly take your bag on accident and not realize it until they get to their hotel room or home.  Make sure you put a florescent type of colored tag on your bag with your full name and address on it.  This will bring more attention to your bag.  Also be sure to place your name inside the bag as well.  A good trick is to place duct tape on the inner edge and simply write your name on it.

Tear off old itinerary tags.

If you have travelled before, make sure that those pesky itinerary tags are ripped off your bag.  If you by chance keep them on, the airliner may throw your bag on a different flight.  In order to avoid this confusion, make sure your tags are ripped off your bag completely.

Take a picture.

Just in case your bag is stolen, take a picture of the inside of the bag and the outside.  This way if the airliner is at fault, you will have evidence of what was inside the bag.  This will help ease along the investigation if this does incur.

These are a just a few tips you can follow in order to avoid lost luggage.  Even if you do follow these simple steps, bags can still be lost.   If your bag does get lost, make sure you contact the airliner office immediately upon arrival.  Every airport has them, just ask an airline worker.  Remember, that a calm customer will get a lot further than an aggressive one.