About

One site. Every answer about lost luggage.

We built this site because we’ve been the person standing at an empty carousel, Googling “what do I do when my bag is lost,” and getting a wall of outdated blog posts and airline runarounds. Missed medication, a kid’s comfort blanket sitting in a warehouse in Frankfurt, a suit needed for a meeting in two hours — and the internet couldn’t give us a straight answer.^[1]

So we built the resource we wished existed.

Why we exist

The internet isn’t short on travel content. But when your bag goes missing, the travel internet fails you in specific, predictable ways.

Some sites track bags but don’t explain your rights. Others explain your rights but don’t tell you how to prevent the problem in the first place. Product review sites recommend luggage trackers without understanding how airline baggage systems actually work — they test devices in parking lots and call it a review. And most travel blogs treat lost luggage as a sidebar to their credit card affiliate deals, giving you 300 words of recycled advice between ads for the Chase Sapphire Preferred.

When your bag is missing, you don’t need a sidebar. You need one place that covers the full picture: what to do right now, what you’re legally owed, how to prevent it next time, and which products actually help. And you need that information to be accurate, current, and written by people who understand the difference between a Property Irregularity Report and a lost luggage claim.

That’s what we built. One site that covers everything about lost, delayed, and damaged airline baggage — from the moment you pack your suitcase to the moment you file a compensation claim.

Why this site works differently

Baggage is all we do

We’re not a travel blog that happens to have a lost luggage article. We’re not a credit card site that writes about bags when it’s convenient. This is our entire focus.

That means we go deeper than anyone else. We maintain individual guides for every major airline’s lost luggage process. We track compensation limits as they change. We understand WorldTracer, the global baggage tracing system that most travel writers haven’t heard of. When we write about a topic, we cover it completely — because it’s the only thing we do.

We don’t answer to airlines or advertisers

We follow the same editorial standards as Wirecutter and NerdWallet. Our tracker recommendations come from real-world testing on actual flights, not press releases from manufacturers. Our compensation guides cite specific federal regulations and international treaties, not paraphrased advice from other blogs.

When we recommend a product, it’s because we’d put it in our own suitcase. When we say an airline’s lost luggage process is difficult to navigate, we say it plainly. We’ve turned down sponsorship deals that would have required us to recommend products we didn’t test.

We built this for people in crisis

Half of our visitors arrive stressed. They’re standing at an empty carousel, searching on their phone with one hand while holding a boarding pass in the other. They’re in a foreign country where they don’t speak the language. They’re traveling with kids who are asking where their things are.

We designed every page with that reality in mind. Our emergency guides are structured to be read on a mobile phone in under two minutes. The most critical information comes first. Steps are numbered and actionable. Phone numbers are tappable. We don’t bury the answer below five paragraphs of background context.

We don’t publish and forget

Airline policies change. Compensation limits adjust for inflation. New trackers launch. Regulations get revised. A guide that was accurate six months ago may send you down the wrong path today.

Every page on this site displays a “Last Updated” date, and we mean it. We review and refresh content quarterly, and we update immediately when airline policies or regulations change. We do this because outdated advice about your legal rights isn’t just unhelpful — it’s harmful.

How we make money

Baggage Finder is free to read, and we want to be straightforward about how we keep it that way.

Affiliate commissions

When you buy a luggage tracker or other product through a link on our site, we may earn a small commission from the retailer. This is the standard affiliate model used by editorial sites like Wirecutter, RTINGS, and NerdWallet.

Here’s what matters: affiliate commissions never influence our recommendations. We recommend products we’ve tested and believe in. If a tracker doesn’t perform well in our testing, we’ll say so regardless of the affiliate relationship. If a product we recommend isn’t available through an affiliate program, we link to it anyway. Our job is to give you the best recommendation, not to maximize our commission.

The commission doesn’t affect the price you pay. You pay the same price whether you click our link or go directly to the retailer.

Display advertising

Some pages on our site display ads from third-party ad networks. We keep ad density low to preserve the reading experience. On emergency guide pages — the ones you’re most likely reading under stress — we’re especially careful about ad placement. We won’t put a revenue goal ahead of your ability to quickly find the information you need.

What we don’t do

We don’t accept payment for editorial placement. We don’t let advertisers review content before publication. We don’t run sponsored content disguised as editorial recommendations. We don’t sell your data. We don’t have premium tiers or paywalled content.

Our standards

Fact-checked against primary sources

Our compensation guides cite the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Montreal Convention, and individual airline contracts of carriage. We go to the primary source — the actual regulation, the actual policy document — rather than relying on what another website says about it. When regulations change, we update our content to reflect the current rules, not the ones from three years ago.

Real-world product testing

Every tracker we recommend has been tested on real flights in checked luggage. We pack them into suitcases, check those suitcases on domestic and international flights — including connections, where most bags go missing — and evaluate performance under real conditions. We publish our testing methodology so you can evaluate our process and hold us accountable.

Regular updates

Every page displays a “Last Updated” date. We review and refresh content on a regular cycle, and we update immediately when we learn about changes to airline policies, compensation limits, or regulations. If a page hasn’t been updated recently, we want you to know that — and we want the pressure on ourselves to fix it.

Corrections policy

When we get something wrong, we correct it publicly and note the change. We don’t quietly edit pages and hope nobody notices. If you spot an error on any page — an outdated phone number, a changed policy, a broken link — we want to hear about it. Accuracy matters more than appearances, and our readers are often the first to catch changes.

If you find something that needs correcting, contact us at [email protected].

Who we are

We’ve stood in the baggage service office at 11 PM filling out a Property Irregularity Report in a language we don’t speak. We’ve tracked a bag from JFK to Heathrow to a warehouse in Delhi using nothing but an AirTag and stubborn persistence. We’ve filed compensation claims that were denied, appealed, and eventually paid. We’ve navigated the system from every angle, and we built this site so you don’t have to figure it out alone.

Our team combines experience in travel journalism, consumer advocacy, and aviation policy. We’re a small, independent operation. We’re not owned by an airline, a claims service, or a credit card company. We don’t have investors pushing us to prioritize revenue over editorial quality. We don’t have partnerships that compromise our recommendations.

When we have to choose between what’s good for business and what’s good for the reader, we choose the reader. Every time.

Get in touch

If you have a question, a correction, a suggestion, or a story about your own baggage experience, we’d like to hear from you.

Email: [email protected]

We read every message. We can’t provide individual case advice (we’re a content site, not a claims service), but your feedback directly shapes the guides and resources we build.