Business Ideas in Romania

“Losing my virginity” with British Airways

• Posted by Anca on April 26th, 2007 filed in Services, Tourism and travel, Transportation

Opportunity: Personalized stickers for identifying suitcases

The trip we had in London was incredible. We met lot of interesting people, we visited the most interesting sites in London, did a bit of shopping. The weather was incredible and everything was perfect….except for the fact that British Airways lost my luggage when I returned home. The problems started from the first moment we checked in when a “nice” and annoying lady kept convincing us that we should check in the entire luggage on the same name. At first I did not understand why… Now I know - the lady must have had problems remembering names. But her problems were so big, that she was not even able to match any of our 6 pieces of luggage with (at least) one correct name from the group. So she checked in the luggage on the same name, but that name was not associated with anybody from our group. (Mr. Waller….if you are out there and missing luggage…we should talk).  Only if we checked very carefully at the small print on the bag tags would we have seen it was a different name.
My other colleagues have received their luggage after one day. Mine is still “travelling”.  British Airways was now asking for a description of the bag and its contents.   Now… three days after my return, they might have found my bag but… as my bag is a quite common model… it is not very easy to identify from the others.  If it were pink, the situation would be different.

The funny thing is that the unique item within my bag  that ultimately identified it was the book of Richard Branson “Losing my virginity” where he writes about how he founded and managed the Virgin Group. He also has a chapter about the unfair competition that British Airways imposed on Virgin’s airline. It actually strikes hard at British Airways.  I just hope that the people from BA won’t make it “lost” after seeing my book.

Why didn’t I have the book on the plane with me? Well, that’s because I was not allowed to have more than one hand bag on the plane and the purse was considered a hand bag. So I took the laptop with me on the plane and put the purse in the suitcase.

I got lucky this time but… this got me thinking that it is important to identify your suitcase better when you travel and avoid situations like mine.  Sometimes they do not understand the writing or it is not visible enough for them to be able to identify the owner. Huge stickers that could be personalized would be one idea. The stickers should be colorful and different, unique, and… in case the company loses your luggage, the sticker would be a different element that would help them better identify and find your luggage. …and of course, send it back to you.

This could be profitable if it was done in such a way that could be a trend where world travels sought to express their personality and avoid luggage mishaps.   Romanians will be traveling more with low-cost airlines and EU accession bring freedom of movement….  What do you think of the idea?