Travel tip: Buy a goofy looking suitcase

Recently, I was faced with finally replacing my luggage. I've been traveling and living primarily outside of my home country and well, I have almost zero regrets about this. When I was looking for new bags I had a few things that I was keeping in mind or was looking for as far as they were concerned but it occurred to me while I was shopping that for the most part, all bags look exactly the same.

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The most popular kind of bag is unsurprising. It is some standard-sized bags that are almost always black. I can understand this allure because of all the clothes that I own, most of my shirts and most of my shoes are also black. It's just an easy color, right? It looks good on everyone and it goes with anything. It just makes sense.

Well not so much when you are standing at a luggage carousel waiting for your bag to come down and having no idea if it is yours or not.

People will do things like put various ribbons on their bags to help them ID their own, but in many airports these things are cut off by the staff because I guess it can interfere with their labyrinth system of auto sorting that takes place in the back where none of us get to see it. So when the machine spits out your luggage on the other end you are always going to be standing there wondering "is that mine?"

I have actually been near assaulted for simply picking up the wrong bag and because it looked exactly like mine, I quickly opened it up to confirm whether it was in fact, my own bag. To this day I have no idea how the real owner was aware that it was his and not mine and of course I had no intention of stealing it. He was really upset with me and we didn't speak the same language so I just said sorry and went back to looking for my actual bag, which arrived moments later and I turned around to show it to him and unfortunately he was no longer there.

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For most people, getting black bags seems like the obvious choice but when I got my newest set of bags it occurred to me that this is a minor problem that added more stress to my travel and for most people, it is completely irrelevant what their bags actually look like. I mean for the ultra-wealthy a suitcase might be some sort of fashion something or other, but for the vast majority of people it is merely a device used to transport your underpants so why bother going with the exact same thing that everyone else has?

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So when I was in the store recently I looked around for the most outlandish color that they maybe only had 1 or 2 of and chose that. As far as function is concerned, it is exactly the same as all the other ones, including the dozens of black ones that they had in stock.

On my very first test run of this theory, I all of a sudden felt absolutely zero stress at the check baggage claim because it was extremely evident which one of the bags was mine. At all 4 airport stops where I had to ID and claim my bag, mine was the only blaze orange one in attendance.

Some people might feel silly having such a strange color for a bag but for me, airports are not enjoyable experiences anyway so I feel no need to introduce additional stress by not being sure which bag is mine.

I was able to stand back unlike the frantic people at the front who are picking up tons of bags to check the tag to see if it was theirs because well, it was obvious which one was mine even as it dropped onto the belt on the other side of the room.

For me, this has been the best luggage decision that I have ever made in my life. Who cares if it stands out and isn't designer? That sort of stuff doesn't really matter to me and I don't think it really matters to anyone else. I recall in my youth my father, who traveled a lot for work, had this extremely ugly luggage set that was a type of green that I don't even know the name of.

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I believe this is exactly it. It never occurred to me to ask my father why he had such and ugly luggage set because I was a kid and what the hell did I know about travel? I only asked him after purchasing my blaze orange suitcase and much to my delight he informed me that he intentionally purchased luggage that looked different than all the others for easy identification.

I'll tell you what, it is a really good way to go and I highly recommend that you do the same the next time you find yourself needing a new bag. Black is boring, orange is easy!