Planning

We always hold our breath for just a moment when we are in the baggage area of an airport. We know that missing and lost luggage when flying is a more common phenomenon than you would think. After almost 15 years of international travel, visiting well over 100 airports in 60+ countries, we have been fortunate enough never to have a bag go missing.

Until now.

We returned to the USA from Amsterdam (via London) on British Airways when they lost our luggage. Not just one bag. Not just two bags. But four missing bags. 

You can imagine our panic when we were at baggage claim, the conveyor belt came to a halt, and we (along with many others) were told that was it. Not only did our suitcases have all of our clothes in them (thankfully we were heading home and not just starting our trip), but also all of our toiletries, many souvenirs, Christmas gifts, and, perhaps most importantly, a lot of rare Belgian beer from our holiday.

We sprang into action to either be reunited with our bags promptly or, worst case, adequately compensate for all that lost value. So in this one, we wanted to walk through what you should do if you find yourself at an airport baggage claim and an airline has lost your luggage.

Note: This article will include the steps we took for our lost luggage on British Airways; however, most airlines have similar processes albeit possibly with slightly different timescales. When in doubt, always speak to a representative before leaving the airport, find out their recommended steps, and, if possible, get everything in writing and/or in an email with company letterhead for tracking as quickly as possible.

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Are you shopping for travel gifts for your favorite explorer?

While there is a seemingly neverending list of products that could be recommended in gift guides for travelers, in ours, we wanted to cut through the fluff and share a few items that we think are the absolute best.

Suffice it to say, if we were to receive any travel gift in this guide, we would be quite ecstatic!

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As we are reaching the point in our lives where we desire comforts when we travel, flying in business class has been something we're moving to more and more. But as we typically cannot afford these tickets outright (as conventional routes can be $2,000, $3,000, $5,000, or more roundtrip), we have been acquiring these coveted seats in recent years using points. 

In the past, we would go the conventional route for snagging a rewards business class seat- simply using a boatload of points to buy the ticket outright while only having to pay taxes on the flight (often a nominal amount). But our points-earning capabilities have dropped a bit in the last few years such that we have to be a bit more selective with how we redeem our points when flying.

Thankfully, many airlines also let you upgrade a paid economy ticket with a mix of miles and dollars as a bit of a hybrid approach to try and snag a business class seat for less of a hit to your bottom line (pending availability). We tried this on a recent flight from Newark to Lisbon, Portugal, and had success in getting upgraded on our red-eye flight outbound.

So in this one, we thought we'd take a look at the process to score a United upgrade with miles and dollars, who has the best odds of snagging a seat in this process, and what happened when we didn't get upgraded on our return flight home!

• Note: This article is based on our travel experiences flying United in October 2021. Rules can and do change regularly so please read current T&Cs of your particular airline before upgrading a future flight as things may change.

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The last year has been rough.

Not just in a “quarantining-at-home-sucks” rough, but also as a travel writer I've had to effectively kill my business as a matter of public safety. I won't bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that our traffic is dead, our social media reach is dead, and it is going to be a hell of a time to turn things around over the coming months and years.

I'm thankful, in many ways, that I also have a local blog for my city because after the initial shutdown many people had to stick local by default. In fact, March 2021 was our third best traffic month ever and we expect that only to rise as more and more individuals get vaccinated.

But what about this travel blog? In the last 12 months, we went on precisely one trip- a socially distant road trip to the Finger Lakes to enjoy some wine outdoors for a long weekend (with quarantines before and after our trip, of course).

Now that we are fully vaccinated, well, it is time to change that. We are starting to travel again, and in this one we are sharing a bit more on how we are approaching things.

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