Bag check!

My husband and I just returned from a two week empty nester vacation. Wow. (Well, actually we returned two weeks ago, but I’ve found that it takes about as long as the trip itself for me to feel like I’m back in the home swing of things.) I love traveling in every way–by myself, with my hubby, with friends, with kids, with all of the above–but it is WAY easier when it is just the two of us. (Not to mention less expensive.) But that’s not the point of this post. What I want to write about today is the inanity of what we have to do with our luggage on returning to the U.S. via airplane. (I know, first world problem, but still annoying.)

We returned to the country through Detroit this time (there’s a first time for everything!), but it happens in every airport. If you are returning to the United States from somewhere outside of the country and your point of entry is not your home airport (which, living here in the middle of the country, our point of entry is NEVER our home airport), you have to do a ridiculous thing with your checked bags. After you go through immigration, you pick up your bags, carry (or roll) them a few hundred feet through a door, and then return them to the airline to be “re-checked.” What the heck?

The official reason for this apparently is that the government wants you to go through customs the moment you arrive in the country. I sort of understand that, although there is no real customs check–you walk through a door. Sometimes you have a piece of paper to hand to or show a customs officer; sometimes there is no one there and you walk right through. And even if that’s what they want, I still don’t understand why we have to claim the bags. Why not just have the airline move them? As with a domestic connection? I hereby give my permission to send my suitcase through whatever machines necessary to let them travel on. (Not that my permission is necessary, as I’m pretty sure that’s in the fine print when I buy an airplane ticket.)

I’m also not sure who is carrying stuff through an airport and needs to declare it. I’ve seen the movies where bank robbers are taping cash to their bodies to get through security. I don’t even want to think about where the drug dealers hide stuff. I’m pretty sure that legitimate businesses aren’t having people take goods for sale through their one free checked bag on an international flight. I once was cornered by a fierce drug-sniffing German shepherd in the San Francisco airport when returning from a work trip to Hong Kong–he found a banana in my carryon I’d forgotten was there. I feel so much safer now!

Let’s assume for a moment that there actually are people who are declaring goods on their return to the United States. Do they have to claim and re-check their bags in order to do that? Couldn’t they just, well, say so? If the government wants to look and see if people are telling the truth, the people they should be checking are those who DON’T declare anything. Which from my (admittedly non-scientific) polling appears to be 100% of the people on any flight I’ve ever flown or asked others about. If people are honest enough to declare something, why would you need to check their suitcases? And can’t you check via machine? Weren’t all those bags x-rayed before they got on the plane anyway?

There are a lot of things I don’t understand about travel (and about life in general, but I’m trying to limit myself to one thing at a time). I do know that making a bunch of tired, dirty, cranky people wait for their bags after getting off a long flight, just to tote them a few hundred feet before getting to stand in ANOTHER line to go through security AGAIN (potentially the topic of another post) seems both pointless and somewhat punitive. We move like sheep through this process that no one understands. It’s like daylight savings time. It doesn’t have to be this way! Let’s rise up and demand a change!

I guess I shouldn’t complain, though, given that at least my luggage showed up. I am truly thankful every time my suitcase and I end up in the same place, which does not always happen. I think this has been an issue since the dawn of travel. As Bob Hope said, “I’ve been to almost as many places as my luggage.” Perhaps next time I’ll just carry on.