How to Prepare Your Luggage for Safe Travel

How to Prepare Your Luggage for a Safe Trip?

Theft, loss, mechanical damage... Our luggage faces many risks at the airport. We especially need to worry about checked luggage, which we completely lose sight of for a while. Fortunately, properly preparing your luggage for travel is enough to reduce the risk of unpleasant incidents.

Choosing the Right Suitcase

Preparation for a safe and calm trip starts at the stage of buying a suitcase. It is important what material it is made of, its construction, and even its color. Travel suitcases are usually divided into hard and soft types. Hard models are a bit less flexible than soft ones, but they provide the best protection for luggage against mechanical damage. They are also harder to cut open, which prevents theft or placing unwanted items inside. Pay attention to the color of the suitcase as well, because the brighter and more unusual it is, the easier it will be to spot your luggage among many others. It is preferable to choose bright pink or blue rather than black or dark blue. Another thing to check when buying a suitcase is whether it has protective mechanisms such as locks, padlocks, or special locking straps that prevent the suitcase from accidentally opening.

Marking Your Luggage

We already mentioned buying a suitcase in a contrasting color. This is one way to make identifying your luggage easier, but it is recommended to mark it in other ways as well. Stores offer special colorful tags that not only help mark the suitcase but also serve as decoration. Some of them have interesting designs or funny inscriptions. Another very important step is to attach a special tag with your contact details to the suitcase. This way, if your luggage gets lost, it will be easier for the person who finds it to contact you. The information you should include is: full name, mailing address, email, and phone number. For even easier identification of your property, you can also add your flight number.

Locking the Suitcase (Combination Lock, Padlock)

The basis for protecting the suitcase from accidental opening, theft of contents, or placing unwanted items inside is proper closing. At minimum, the suitcase can be secured with a special strap, but this will not protect you from deliberate attempts to access the contents. In this case, the type of lock is important, and the best solution is to choose a suitcase with a combination lock. Properly setting such a lock, as shown in the video below, ensures that the suitcase can only be opened by authorized persons. If the suitcase does not have a built-in combination lock, a good option to protect the contents is to buy a special padlock. Key and combination padlocks are easy to attach to the suitcase and provide additional security.

Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYD_mgMiQbQ&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=WingsPoland

Wrapping Luggage in Stretch Film – Is It Worth It?

More and more often at airports, we can see suitcases wrapped in film. Although it looks unusual, this is actually a practice to protect luggage from damage or accidental opening. The suitcase is wrapped with stretch film and this can be done either at home or at the airport before check-in. More and more airports have specialized points for wrapping luggage. Is it worth doing? Among the advantages of wrapping, we can note protection against crushing, scratching, dirt, or wetting of the luggage. The film also protects tags and markers and reduces the likelihood of the suitcase getting stuck on the baggage belt. Unfortunately, wrapping can be expensive, looks environmentally unfriendly, and takes time both for wrapping and later removing the film. Nevertheless, you can wrap your luggage at home with biodegradable film.