Lost tips

A United Airlines passenger flew two hours across the US after the airline failed to reunite her with her bag.

A missing phone is never fun. But what if you lost your phone, then had the entire world learn about your list of life goals? 

According to technology solutions company Asurion, 19 million phones are lost or stolen each year, and traveling puts you at higher risk for theft. Don’t wait until it’s too late—know what to do if your phone is lost or stolen on a trip so you can recover faster, protect your identity, and not lose all those great vacation photos.

It’s generally a good rule of thumb that you shouldn’t travel with valuables. Still, people do. Maybe you bring some fancy jewelry to wear for a special occasion. Maybe you buy an antique lamp and opt not to ship it home.

One of the New Seven Wonders of the World, the Lost City of Petra hides coyly behind Southern Jordan’s pink sandstone cliffs. The rock-cut ruins of the lost Nabatean Kingdom feature Corinthian pillars, Hellenistic urns, and, in the case of the Treasury, classical relief sculptures fit for a king. The contrast between the jagged desert cliffs and the grand edifices that adorn them is as jarring as a crop circle perfectly etched into a field of corn.

Checking a bag? Whether you are voluntarily or you’re forced to at the gate, hopefully you’re not flying Envoy Air or ExpressJet Airlines, as they placed last in a study of luggage handling.

Here’s a good reason not to check a bag—during the second half of 2021, U.S. airlines lost or mishandled over 1.2 million bags. As the pandemic waned and travel picked back up, the amount of mishandled luggage also increased—by 80.6 percent, in fact.

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.

While great centres of civilization such as Athens, Rome and Istanbul still endure, there’s nothing quite like the melancholy grandeur of an abandoned city to really fire the historical imagination. From Salona to Pompeii, here are ten of the most evocative:

If a guidebook tells you that something is “impossible to describe”, it usually means the writer can’t be bothered to describe it – with one exception. After pondering the views of the Grand Canyon for the first time, the most spectacular natural wonder on Earth, most visitors are stunned into silence. Committed travellers hike down to the canyon floor on foot or by mule, spending a night at Phantom Ranch, or hover above in a helicopter to get a better feeling for its dimensions. But it is still hard to grasp. The problem isn’t lack of words. It’s just that the canyon is so vast and so deep, that the vista stretches so far across your line of vision, up, down and across, giving the impression of hundreds of miles of space, that it’s a bit like looking at one of those puzzles in reverse – the more you stare, the more it becomes harder to work out what it is or where you are. Distance becomes meaningless, depth blurs, and your sense of time and space withers away.

In the mysterious setting of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Kiki Deere explores one of the world’s most unusual landscapes.

Some of the world's greatest cities are no more. Once thriving, hundreds of cities across the world now lie in ruins – ravaged either by war or simply a natural progression. These are the world's greatest lost cities.

One of the great joys of travelling is stumbling across unexpected places, wandering without a single destination in mind and embracing the journey. These places are perfect for just that – so abandon the map, leave the sat nav behind and let the road take you where it will.

Tom Latkovic woke up in disbelief. He’d found the woman of his dreams and somehow, less than 12 hours later, lost her – maybe forever.