Whether you've just arrived on your holiday or just got home, this is pretty much the worst part of travelling.
You're off the hours-long flight, you feel tired and smelly, and you either just want to get to your hotel and jump in the pool to get your holiday started right, or you just want to get home and order a Chinese before your return to the real world kicks in.
We are talking about, of course, the baggage claim area.
While sometimes you're lucky and the bag is already waiting for you when you get off the plane, other times it can feel like you've celebrated several birthdays waiting for your luggage to arrive.
If you want your bags to be some of the first off the flight, then you can chance your arm being one of the last to actually check-in to the flight, following the last-in-first-out philosophy, but that doesn't actually guarantee your bag will go on the plane last, and if you're doing any kind of connecting flight, then that whole plan goes right out the window.
You could also try to get gate-checked, but that means that any liquids or the like that might have gone through on a normal check-in won't be able to go through the stricter restrictions at the security checks.
However, the folks at
Travel + Leisure Magazine have a very handy hint to help get your bag off first:
"Asking the representative at the check-in counter to attach a fragile sticker to your bag. Bags that are marked as fragile will typically be loaded later and come out before the other bags. Plus, they're also likely to get less wear and tear."
Seems simple enough.
A little too simple, really.
As in ... why didn't we think of this before?
Of course, the problem with this advice is that everybody who reads this will be asking for Fragile stickers, which means the entire plane will be full of "Fragile" bags, so we're kinda right back to where we started, aren't we?
