Julie Taillefer has been experiencing one of the unfortunate realities of air travel, after arriving back at Calgary International Airport early Monday morning — but her bag never joined her.
“The baggage started coming down, I waited… and it never showed up,” Taillefer said.
Thankfully, Taillefer says, this is the first time she’s had to deal with a situation like this.
After filing a claim with Air Canada, she was promised they’d keep in touch — so she drove 90 minutes home to Drumheller, Alta.
When she woke up the next morning, she checked the location of the AirTag placed in her luggage, finding it had last been located inside the arrivals terminal at 7:11 a.m. that morning.
A screenshot from Julie Taillefer’s phone, showing her AirTag inside her luggage at Calgary International Airport. It was last located several hours after all the bags from her flight had been collected.
Julie Taillefer / Supplied
“It’s fairly frustrating,” Taillefer said. “I can see my bag sitting there, but I can’t get it.”
Taillefer reached out to the airline several times and also contacted the airport’s lost and found department to no avail.
After getting nowhere, she then reached out to Global News. After contacting Air Canada, they issued a statement saying they would get in touch with her.
“In this case, we can confirm from our scanning records, that the passenger’s bag was offloaded in Calgary from the aircraft of flight AC228/May 4 01:40 MDT,” the airline said.
“It was then inducted into the baggage arrivals system and delivered to Carousel 9 at 01:51 MDT.”
Air Canada believes another passenger may have taken off with her bag.
“We continue looking for it and have requested video footage from the Airport Authority for both baggage carousel area and around Deville’s, the location the Air Tag was reporting,” the airline said.
“It has not been returned to our baggage team.”
Taillefer disputes that claim, saying she arrived at the baggage area before they began to hit the carousel.
“There weren’t very many people in the airport because it was after midnight,” Taillefer said.
“There was no way anyone would have taken it… I was right there at the chute.”
Taillefer’s AirTag data shows it was in the airport area five hours after Air Canada says it initially arrived to the carousel.
One airline expert says data like this can be extremely helpful.
“(AirTags) are helpful, mostly for your satisfaction,” explained Rick Erickson, a Calgary-based airline industry analyst .
“Now you know it’s somewhere in the system (and it’s) highly unlikely that it’s been lost or stolen.”
Air Canada reached out to Taillefer on Thursday afternoon, after her interview with Global News. They told her it still hadn’t been found, but they had been working on it.
Making matters worse, she’s heading on a weeks-long road trip in just a few days, and she’d like to take some of the items in that bag with her on her next adventure.
“I just want to talk to somebody and explain I can see where the bag was sitting, right at the terminal.”
Just like the areas passengers see when travelling through the airport, Erickson says the systems underneath them that handle luggage have also evolved significantly over the years.
“(Airlines and airports) track the bag from the time it left your hand, to the time it gets loaded on to the airplane, and vice versa,” Erickson said.
“The airlines themselves are trying as hard as they can to move away from using labour at the airport. The more they can get you, as the passenger, to do, the cheaper it is for them to operate.
“The Calgary (system) is pretty highly evolved. They’ve got individual, numbered carts that travel around the airport system. Those are all numbered. Your bag, when it enters that cart… is correlated to that cart number, and at any time, (airports and airlines) know where that cart is.”
The Calgary Airport Authority handles roughly 12.5 million bags each year, and on peak travel days, there can be upwards of 30,000 bags coming through the system.
Issues still arise from time to time — but Erickson says they’re few and far between these days.
“They can be mechanical, with the actual baggage system, with the computerized system, or occasionally, there’s some sort of mishandling when it falls out of the cart (for example).”
As security has steadily increased in the airline industry, Erickson says time has been added to a process like this.
“They’re very afraid of fraud, and they’re going to check you very carefully. It adds to the time delays.”
Taillefer says the situation is inconvenient, but understandable. She’s happy she put her AirTag in her luggage for the first time before the trip, but she says the lack of communication is the most frustrating.
“I can’t get a hold of anybody and give them details… I don’t know if they’re even trying.”