My Luggage Was Lost for 6 Days; This Is What I Learned

After weather delays, our writer was without her luggage and her husband’s CPAP machine

an illustration of a man and woman sitting on a bench in a city while people walk by with suitcases

A trip to Brussels for writer Ashley Milne-Tyte and her husband didn’t go as planned when their luggage didn’t arrive with them. One of her takeaways: Have your airline's international phone numbers on hand. On her trip, the only way she could interact with her airline was through its app.

Ben O'Brien

Ashley Milne-Tyte,

AARP

Published March 20, 2026

It was going to be our first empty-nester trip, after sending my stepson off to college last year. Like all travelers, we were looking forward to new experiences. We certainly got them.

We arrived at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport one afternoon in mid-December, after a few inches of snowfall that morning. We checked ourselves and our suitcases onto a flight to Belgium and joined the snaking security line.

We didn’t see our luggage again for almost a week.

Our travel hell began with two canceled flights at JFK spurred by the chaos wrought by the snow. We were kicked off one plane idling on the tarmac at 2 a.m.; the crew announced they had timed out and could no longer fly. We witnessed a near mutiny of passengers when the airline made clear that no, we could not retrieve our luggage, and that no hotels would be provided. Direct flights to our original destination, Brussels, were booked for days. We flew the following evening to Paris in the same clothes we’d been wearing for 36 hours, and planned to make our way to our final destination by train — only to discover on landing that our bags hadn’t made it.

My husband tells me I’m more anxious than I used to be, which I put down to menopause. I was anxious as I huddled over a phone trying to rebook a flight as we sniped at each other.

two images of the author and her husband

The author and her husband, David, before and after receiving their lost luggage, which included David’s CPAP machine.

Courtesy Ashley Milne-Tyte

It’s not just me. Meghan Beier is a clinical psychologist at the Rowan Center for Behavioral Medicine in Towson, Maryland. Beier, who works with older adults, says, “The act of travel can also be quite anxiety-inducing, especially with all of the uncertainties and unknowns.” Airports are loud, overstimulating places. “It’s a heavy cognitive load on people, period, no matter what age you are. And as you’re getting older, that can be amplified,” she says.

Travel chaos also involves a lot of troubleshooting. We went from our phones to the airline’s app and back again, trying to reschedule our journey while available flights disappeared before our eyes. Beier says people’s ability “to problem-solve quickly, attend to lots of different pieces of information — all of that tends to decline over time just naturally, for all of us.” Take it from me: It’s worse when you’re doing it at 3 a.m.

Arriving in Belgium felt like a feat. But my heart sank when I remembered my husband had packed his CPAP machine, for sleep apnea, in our missing luggage. (A CPAP machine is generally considered a medical device and doesn’t count toward a passenger’s carry-on limit.) My nerves were already jangling from exhaustion and worries over when we’d see our belongings again. Now I was waking up in the middle of the night to resounding snores that rendered my earplugs useless. Sleeplessness is not a good look for someone in their 50s. Within a day I had bags under my eyes that were almost as large as the ones we were missing. This continued until we got our luggage back, five days later.

It was not the relaxing, adults-only trip we had been looking forward to.

Bad weather can cause a ripple effect

It turns out our situation was likely the result of what Ahmed Abdelghany, a professor of operations management at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, says is a ripple effect of the bad weather. Planes that were supposed to fly into an airport could be grounded in their city or country of origin because of storms at the destination airport.

“Since [they’re] short on resources in the receiving airport, there will be some cancellations for sure, because they don’t have the aircraft, they don’t have the crew,” says Abdelghany. And why no help from the airline while we sorted it out? Airlines in the U.S. do not have to compensate passengers for food or overnight stays when flight delays or cancellations are weather-related.

As for our long-lost bags, Abdelghany thinks that because we were booked on multiple flights over a hectic 24 hours, our luggage was likely mis-tagged, then caught in a glut of bags that required human, rather than automated, help to reach their owners.

“Once the bag does not have the right tag on it, somebody has to do the sorting manually and track where is that passenger and where is that bag, and try to match them, and then try to find the next flight it will take,” Abdelghany explains. “Somebody’s got to search in a pile of bags.… It’s a mess.”

What I know now (and what I’d do differently)

The obvious way to dodge the worst effects of a travel meltdown is to not check your bags — something I’d resisted because we were going to be away for two weeks. Abdelghany is team carry-on, as is Clint Henderson of travel advice website The Points Guy. Henderson is a very frequent flyer who describes himself as having “PTSD in my 50s from a lifetime of travel disruptions.”

But those disruptions have given him an edge I wish we’d had on our trip.

For instance, I had no idea that when massive delays and cancellations occur, especially when caused by weather, your airline can often book you on a rival carrier without charging you extra. “The airlines don’t like to do it, but they will,” Henderson says. This is thanks to something called an “interline agreement,” a partner agreement between airlines that allows one airline to rebook passengers on another airline. These agreements often kick in during what airlines call “irregular operations”: in other words, when there are lots of delays and cancellations and passengers are scrambling to reach their destinations.

Henderson is a fan of apps such as Flighty, Flightradar24 and FlightAware, which let you track your plane’s actual whereabouts. That way, if the airline shows your flight as on time but the flight-tracking app shows your plane hundreds of miles away, you can choose to rebook and get ahead of any cancellation chaos.

Once we were abroad, our only way to interact with the airline was through its app, which involved first getting past an AI bot (the lost-baggage phone number was overwhelmed and sending callers to the website). Typing hundreds of words on a tiny phone screen was awkward and aggravating. I couldn’t imagine my 85-year-old mother doing it, partly because she has arthritis in her hands, also because her comfort with technology has its limits.

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“It’s not intuitive for someone who’s not technologically advanced,” Henderson says of app-only service. “I even struggle with it as someone who works with a computer all day. It’s very frustrating.”

But he has a hack for that: Before you go abroad, “get the phone number for the international help desk [of the airline]. And so you have a backup phone number to use if the U.S. phone numbers are overwhelmed.” The airline could have numbers in multiple countries. Write them all down before you leave.

Our bags finally turned up on a Saturday night, six days after our initial check-in at JFK the previous Sunday.

Our airline fully compensated us for the items we bought during the days we were without our luggage. But that was only after my husband persisted via email, and after I contacted its public relations department asking for an interview for this story (the airline declined).

“We tell people to book with a credit card that has travel protections built in,” Henderson says. “So, sometimes, if the airline won’t compensate you for all your extra costs, the credit card insurance will cover it.”

He says being politely pushy and asking to escalate the matter, or writing to the CEO’s office, can work in your favor. But he adds that getting your problem resolved is often a matter of luck.

What we’ll do differently next time: take the airline’s international phone numbers, try to only pack a carry-on, and, failing that, use tracking devices on our bags. Cultivate a Zen attitude. And, to ensure a restful break, that CPAP machine will be coming along as hand luggage.

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Ashley Milne-Tyte is a writer and audio journalist who covers aging. She has written for NPR, Marketplace, The Christian Science Monitor and Next Avenue, among other publications.