Lifted Lingerie: Unpacking the Disturbing Trend of Underwear Theft from Airline Luggage

by Gary Leff

When you give up your checked bag, anything can happen to it. It may be lost. It may get mangled in the airport’s baggage conveyor system. TSA may inspect it, and take things from it. Or another passenger might take it from baggage claim. There’s no system in place to ensure that the bag you take from the carousel is your own.

Lost luggage can be especially frustrating because you’ll file a claim and it may feel as though it’s gone into a black hole. Getting updates on the status of your bag can be frustrating. There’s a whole cottage industry of viral social posts showing the location of lost bags using Apple AirTags, but where the airline is clueless and helpless to use that information to track down the bag.

When your bag is finally found, the airline usually delivers it to you. But the person who’s tasked with the delivery has to be trusted with your belongings too? The delivery driver may be hired off of a gig economy website.

One American Airlines passenger discovered that the multiple failure points along the way meant that even though she finally got back her lost luggage, it had most mostly cleaned out by thieves: “even my underwear was stolen.”

Earlier this year a Delta passenger complained her panties were stolen from her checked luggage as well.

It’s difficult to pinpoint who is to blame, which is why when there is more than one airline on your itinerary, it’s the last airline before your destination that is responsible for it even if it was lost or damaged along the way by a different airline, by airport security, or by the service delivering your lost bags.

Most luggage surely has more valuable items than underwear to take but there are subcommunities all over the internet where they probably do command a premium. The underwear thieves will probably be harder to identify than when a TSA employee stole a CNN camera and forgot to remove the cable network’s stickers before selling it on eBay.

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. Many of us free-thinkers have long advocated TSA is worthless and should be disbanded. Or at least undergo a serious reorganization with far more accountability. The organized thievery at TSA is out of control. So why do some voters and certain politicians want to support the status quo and continue funding this band of incompetents? And, no, it isn’t for “safety.” Airport screening happened long before the TSA came into existence.

  7. Will the panty thief sniffer please stand up and identify yourself
    Grand larceny is not acceptable

  8. Because if you just wear your lingerie instead of bag checking it; you might get dress coded and evicted by the flight attendant. Just like tiktok stsr Jacy got dress coded by a WN flight attendant.

  9. Every time we fly now it feels like more underwear is stolen. They need to defund this organization and make these perverts get other jobs. Private companies would provide better security than these incompetent morons.

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