Mystery Solved: Here’s Why Your Checked Luggage Gets so Beat-Up

Appalachia is a region and a mind-set. Our devotion to our place belies the fact that we’re hard to pin down on a map: a swath of highlands crossing parts of Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia and the coal country of Kentucky and West Virginia, plus a smidgen of Pennsylvania and points north. State lines make little sense here; we have more in common with other mountain communities than with the far ends of our states and their capitals. Appalachia has few large cities, our economies are land-based and, unless you live here, we’re probably not what you think.

Looks like a bungee cord is the travel emergency tool we didn't know we needed.

A week before a Journee mystery trip, the traveler receives a sealed envelope in the mail. 

It’s the classic pre-trip selfie. You snap a picture of yourself with your passport and boarding pass, then promptly share the photo on social media. Your family, friends and followers may like it.

Delta CEO Ed Bastian has a bold idea: Perhaps the future of his airline’s success lies less in low fares and more in steadily improving service, amenities, and reliability. Delta has made inroads with high-paying business travelers through improved business-class service, but the AP’s Scott Mayerowitz reports that Bastian has no plans to hang the main cabin out to dry.

Would you shelve your favorite piece of luggage and instead use a bag plastered with advertisements if it meant you didn’t have to pay airlines’ checked bag fees anymore?

I’ve noticed a worrying trend among airline passengers lately. After an emergency landing, when flyers must evacuate out of a plane, videos emerge in the news of people fleeing the plane while carrying their luggage.

How, you ask? Apparently thieves figure that tourists typically are (1) likely to be carrying more valuable stuff in their cars than typical locals; (2) once parked, likely to leave their cars unattended for extended time periods; (3) less likely to know local “avoid” spots; (4) more likely to be conned into doing something stupid; and (5) likely to want to keep to their schedules and leave an area rather than stick around to file police reports, ID perps, or testify at hearings or trials. And a rental car is a high-probability sign of a tourist.

Yesterday, two of the world’s largest airlines got new presidents. What’s less clear is how, and why.

There’s a common misconception that entrepreneurs are so single-minded that they don’t have any time for hobbies. That they have to be so focused on their business that they can’t shift their attention to something that is simply interesting to them.

Jacob Keanik scanned his binoculars over the field of ice surrounding our sailboat. He was looking for the polar bear that had been stalking us for the past 24 hours, but all he could see was an undulating carpet of blue-green pack ice that stretched to the horizon. “Winter is coming,” he murmured. Jacob had never seen Game of Thrones and was unaware of the phrase’s reference to the show’s menacing hordes of ice zombies, but to us, the threat posed by this frozen horde was equally dire. Here in remote Pasley Bay, deep in the Canadian Arctic, winter would bring a relentless tide of boat-crushing ice. If we didn’t find a way out soon, it could trap us and destroy our vessel—and perhaps us too.

After one too many lost-luggage incidents, I never check a bag if I can help it. My trusty carry-on suitcase and backpack have served me well through numerous trips abroad, including Scotland, New Zealand, and Iceland.