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Have airlines joined the Mile Lie Club?
A Delta passenger caught the airline in a lie thanks to an Apple AirTag, which showed that her bag was not where they said it was. While originally posted in January, her X post has resurfaced on Reddit, where it is currently going viral.
“Airlines must *hate* air tags,” declared Ami Bruni in the X story, which boasts nearly 8 million views. “My bags were lost yesterday, and this is my third call with the airline where they try to blatantly lie about where my bag is — and I can just be like, ‘nope, that’s not true at all.’”
“I am 100% convinced that if I were not tracking my bags, there would not be nearly the effort to locate them and get them delivered,” she added in a follow-up post.
In another post, Bruni claimed the problem lies in the luggage delivery system, where airlines farm out lost baggage drop off to third-party couriers so they can, in her words, wash their hands of it.
Her post prompted a flurry of stories from Redditors who also used AirTags to track down suitcases that were misplaced.
One appalled flyer claimed that their $9,000 racing bike traveled 5,000 miles in the “opposite direction” from their destination, passing through four different airports before arriving in another country.
Thankfully, they were able to monitor their bag’s every movement, and after demanding they “escalate,” the poster led them to its location “behind some boxes in a room that has no business storing passenger luggage.”
“It was immediately couriered overnight directly to my hotel in Madrid, the next morning,” the Redditor recalled.
“Will never fly without one,” said another while boasting about their accountability device. “The airline ‘lost’ my luggage after we landed. They wanted me to file a claim on a line that was about 10 people deep.”
They added, “The tag told me it was on another belt across from where it was supposed to come out from.”
A third relayed a similar experience where their toiletry kit showed up in several locations, and was only recovered after they provided the employees with the tracking info from inside their luggage.
However, one alleged baggage handler said that most luggage mixups are due to human error and not because the airline is trying to deceive people.
“I swear some people think there’s a secret underground cabal of airline workers out to inconvenience them,” they wrote. “We’re working off someone scanning the little barcode from your bag at different locations.”
They added, “The idea that I would ‘blatantly lie’ to someone about something they can literally look up on their app, and then ‘hate’ that they made my job easier by placing a tag in their luggage is so obnoxious.”
Meanwhile, others pointed out that airlines welcome AirTags as they make their job easier and that Delta allows passengers to integrate the tech into their luggage monitoring system for this purpose.
Previously, they only permitted flyers to temporarily share the location of their Apple tracker with their reps while trying to retrieve lost luggage.
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