A yellow suitcase draws me in like a beacon. It is stacked on a dark shelf at the back of Greasby’s auction house in Tooting, south London, and looks brand new, with a hard exterior and wheels that Richard Stacey, a Greasby’s regular who is dressed in shorts, a plaid shirt and a cream bucket hat, tells me to test. So I test them – and they work. If I was just buying a bag, that is all I would need to know. But this isn’t just a bag: the zip is locked and when I lift it, it is heavy. This yellow suitcase is filled with a stranger’s lost belongings. And I won’t find out what is inside unless I submit a winning bid.
I write down the lot number, 281, and my bid of £70 on a form, along with four other bids – for a larger black bag that is filled to the brim; a sensible blue suitcase with a compass in the handle that I expect belongs to someone older; a small wheelie in Louis Vuitton-like check; and a smart piece of hand luggage that I assume must be a businessperson’s. In all, I bid £250 for five suitcases – way too much – but Stacey has been to the auction house 10 times before, and tells me I probably won’t win if I bid less than £40 on each.
The next day, adrenaline races through my body as I refresh my emails to see what I have won. I have got four of the five suitcases for £100, including the yellow, blue and black bags as well as the fake-looking Louis Vuitton roller.
Stacey’s son calls what I have just done “suitcase gambling”, and it seems as though people are hooked. Lost luggage hauls regularly attract millions of views on social media from people keen to get a glimpse inside a stranger’s life. Recently, for instance, Becky Chorlton, a 27-year-old from Cheshire in north-west England, paid £80 for a blue suitcase from Heathrow that she unpacked in a TikTok video that has had more than 15.1m views.
On his first attempt, Stacey paid £60 for a Samsonite suitcase that he reckons belonged to a “small American lady of about 50”. The clothes inside were all about a size six, short in the leg and immaculately ironed. She seemed like “a professional lady, who liked dining, liked going away with her friends”, he says. “I think she was probably on a cruise for about a week or so, because she had seven pairs of shoes.” There were a few pairs of low heels and some Gucci sliders – which Stacey sold on eBay for the cost of the suitcase.
Stacey, a physiotherapist and father of five from Kingston, in south-west London, likes to think the woman had enough money not to be too bothered about getting her bag back. “It would be nice to track it and give these things back but I couldn’t,” he says. He kept the suitcase, which he estimates is worth about £250, as it was in good condition, while the profits he made from selling its contents went to a fund he has set up to help with his daughter’s university fees. He gave the rest of the items to a charity shop.
Stacey enjoys the randomness of the auctions, where he recently won a suitcase that contained hijabs and women’s football kits from what he suspects was an Arab country. But he also likes how low risk the auctions are. He gives himself a £120 budget each time and says that because it’s a blind-bid process, “you’re not going to get carried away in a bidding war with anyone. It’s just a bit of light relief”.
For Chevelle Jacobs, who I meet at Greasby’s in April, when she is sizing up a hard, shiny, black suitcase, the auctions are as much a social activity with friends, as they are an opportunity to bag a bargain. She has travelled from east London a couple of times since her first auction last year to buy suitcases for her holidays. But she has also bought champagne and laptops – often, these have been seized by the police in raids. Jacobs works for the Elizabeth line, which sends its lost items to Greasby’s, but she found out about airlines selling their lost luggage there on TikTok.
A few months before we met, she had paid £20 for a beige suitcase with a dark brown zip that “looked quite fancy”. She opened it to find a Louis Vuitton handbag, some nice clothes “for someone about five inches shorter”, and several pairs of designer shoes, which she gave to her brother’s girlfriend, who is a size three. The contents were a bonus for Jacobs, who needed a new suitcase for a holiday: “It’s two-thirds cheaper than a suitcase outside is going to be,” she says.
When luggage is lost, it is first logged on a database that lets baggage handlers know the bag hasn’t made it on to the plane. It is then tracked and rerouted. If the tags have fallen off, handlers open it to see if there is a name and phone number inside, or if there are distinguishable contents. Almost 92% of bags are reunited with their owners, but if a bag is unclaimed for three months, it is sent to a third party.
International routes are five times more likely to lose luggage than domestic flights, with 46% of losses occurring when a passenger transits through a second airport. Other factors at play include: ticketing errors, tagging problems, bag switches, security concerns, airport operations, customs, weather disruptions, cancellations and weight restrictions. In the UK, more than 28% of passengers have had their hold luggage mishandled in the past five years.
“Out of the pandemic, there was just so much chaos in the baggage world,” says Nicole Hogg, who is the portfolio director of baggage at SITA, an IT company that services the air transport industry. In 2022, globally, about 26m pieces of luggage were mishandled, nearly eight bags in every 1,000; before the pandemic it was six in every 1,000. “It was a good learning curve for the industry.” Handlers, who were laid off when airports were shut, didn’t come back to their demanding jobs. “It’s tough. People maximise how they pack their bags for 32kg.” With fewer staff and inexperienced recruits sorting through the baggage, it quickly became apparent that the processes couldn’t cope with the influx of post-pandemic travel. “They weren’t as prepared when people came back flying. They thought it would be kind of a slow uptake and it wasn’t.”
Since then, Hogg has seen a big push towards automation, digitalisation and computer vision tech in baggage handling. SITA has introduced a new process to automatically re-flight bags using AI to predict the next available route for the bag without any human intervention. “There’s a lot of pressure from passengers. They say, I can track my pizza delivery. I can track my Amazon parcel. Why can’t I track my bag?” Some airlines have integrated Apple’s new share item location feature for AirTag, allowing them to reunite lost luggage with its owner more quickly. It helped reduce the number of mishandled bags from 7.6 to 6.9 per 1,000 passengers in 2023.
In the past, airlines would have incinerated or dumped lost luggage. But a man called Doyle Owens found a more sustainable solution. He started Unclaimed Baggage, collecting lost property from the US’s main bus lines, Trailways and Greyhound, in 1965, and later from the airlines, in 1973, to resell at his store. His son, Bryan, now runs the company, which has saved 3,300 truckloads of luggage from landfill.
Greasby’s now receives about 70-80 suitcases a month, a lot less than the 200 suitcases they once received from London’s airports, and a small portion of the 1.8m bags that were lost in air travel around the world last year, according to SITA. Mulberry Auctions in Glasgow hosts two sales of unclaimed airport lost property a month. Bristol Commercial Valuers and Auctioneers also sells lost luggage. Lots more is sold on websites such as Unclaimed Baggage, which is still the only retailer of lost luggage in the US.
“If these bags could talk, what a story they would have to tell,” says Bryan Owens, who remembers handling one particularly “old dingy, dirty bag” that had a 40 carat solitaire emerald swaddled inside it. “It was the biggest precious stone I’ve ever seen.” In another well-travelled Gucci suitcase, he found Egyptian artefacts dating back to 1500BC: everything from scarabs and burial masks to a mummified pet falcon. “I’ve never been able to handle something that old,” Bryan says. His team contacted experts at Christie’s in New York, who sold the items for them.
Unclaimed Baggage employs about 400 openers, who have spent 32,000 hours sorting through lost bags the company collects from airports, train stations, bus depots, hotels and casinos this year alone. In the past year, they have found a Turkish ceremonial wedding headdress, a letter signed by Eleanor Roosevelt dated 1944, a bottle with a preserved rattlesnake in a jar of whisky (nothing on the live one they found a few years ago), and some silicone butt pads. There was a freeze-dried chicken foot, a teeth bedazzling kit, a glass eye, and a full sheet of uncut $2 bills. Mostly though, they find underwear, shoes, T-shirts, blouses, jeans, dresses, headphones and books. In 2024, Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us was the most frequently found book.
Chorlton is not convinced that the Delsey suitcase she bought from Undelivrd (which also sells mystery bags, wrapped in black plastic, that it delivers to your door) was genuinely someone’s lost luggage, as the items didn’t seem to match a single person. “There was some kids’ stuff, there was men’s, women’s,” she says, and also traditional outfits from around the world. But some of her viewers disagreed. They said that when they go on holiday they often share stuff in their suitcases so that if one goes missing, they still have clothes at the other end. Either way, it was worth paying £80 for, as the suitcase itself is valued at £220, she says. “People love watching people have bargains.” She has bought two more suitcases since April 2024 and opened them on TikTok. The first was a dusty pink bag full of makeup and clothes, new black-sequined UGG boots, an iPad, which was locked, and a couple of pairs of goggles. She sold or donated most of it to her local charity shop, but there were some bits she kept, including a new manicure set and the suitcase, which she uses to transport the clothes she sells at car boot sales and markets.
TikTok creator Carmie Sellitto knew how well this kind of content did on social media when he tore off the plastic wrapping around a purple suitcase from Heathrow for his 1.2m TikTok followers, but he didn’t realise that he would end up being able to reunite the owner with their suitcase. Most people I spoke to mentioned the strangeness of rummaging through someone else’s personal effects, but Sellito felt especially “weird”, he says, as “the clothes were unwashed”. There was a briefcase on top, which “kind of felt like a prank”. Underneath were some designer shoes, a Cartier box with a receipt for a ring that cost €2,400 (£2,079), and a vintage Louis Vuitton bag containing a purse with a credit card and a woman’s ID.
“I Googled the location and it was an hour and 40 minutes’ drive from where I was at my family home, and the next day I took my friend with me and drove to the person’s house to return the suitcase.” The woman had moved, but after posting the video online, her best friend identified the belongings. “If I hadn’t posted this, this woman wouldn’t have got it back,” Sellitto says.
Today, lost luggage numbers are a small proportion of passenger traffic. Last year, 5.2 billion people travelled by air, surpassing pre-pandemic levels for the first time in five years, with the number expected to double by 2040. The proportion of those who lose their luggage is small. However, that is little consolation for the million or so people whose bags don’t make it to their destination, and whose personal belongings may end up being sold to the highest bidder.
“People always say to me at barbecues: what’s the number one thing I should do?” says Hogg. “Trackers are great,” she says, but to ensure lost bags get returned to their owner, her advice is: “Put your name, number and email inside your bag, because they’ll always try to open the bag to see if there’s any information.” Black, hard-sided suitcases are used by almost half of global travellers, so they are the easiest to misplace. Make sure your bag stands out with a bright tag or sticker. And throw out that old underwear if you don’t want the world to see it.
Unlike Stacey and Jacobs, I wasn’t lucky with the suitcases I picked. The best thing about the yellow suitcase was the smell of freshly laundered clothes. The owner, likely a Scottish Rangers fan if the football top folded up inside is anything to go by, must have lost their bag at the start of their holiday rather than on the way home. My guess, from the Tommy Hilfiger sweatshirt and three pairs of practical boots is that they were embarking on a hiking trip.
The contents of the big black bag didn’t seem to belong to one person, unless they were heading for a themed hen do in the countryside. It was an amalgamation of warm clothes: four scarves, tracksuits and jumpers; as well as a hot-pink costume set of harem pants and matching top; a smart black jumpsuit and fluffy cat ears. But the blue suitcase told a more cohesive story: it was probably the suitcase of a wedding guest with a new suit folded up in plastic bags and a white tie. They were prepared for the cold with Adidas tracksuit bottoms, a woolly jumper and a synthetic blanket with a wolf’s face on it.
The brown chequered suitcase was filled with new children’s clothes, many of them still on hangers, with Mickey Mouse, Spider-Man and text such as “Fashion is Passion” printed on the tops. The labels were written in Ukrainian, probably bought for family members living abroad, from a country where clothes are more affordable.
It is an unnerving feeling going through another person’s lost belongings, and the overwhelming urge is to try to reunite them with their rightful owner, but when most of the suitcase’s contents are donated to charity, it is definitely a more sustainable solution than incineration. And the next time I travel, I’ll be sure to tag and label my bags inside and out to avoid having my dirty clothes broadcast to millions of strangers on TikTok.
