United said it had this woman's missing bag. She tracked it to a residential address

Most of us know the travel fear of a bag not appearing on the belt after a flight. Some of us -- ever more, thanks to the aviation chaos this year -- know the gut punch of it not appearing. But an increasing number of travelers know what it's like to lose a bag and get it back -- not because of airlines' diligence, but because they knew their bag's location thanks to a tracking device they'd packed with their clothes. Valerie Szybala is the latest with a story to tell. The disinformation researcher from Washington D.C. received her lost luggage after nearly six days, during which she tracked it as it went on walkabouts to local malls and McDonald's while the airline told her that the bag was safely at its distribution center.<br/>In fact, it appeared to be at someone's home -- an apartment complex where Szybala says she found other emptied and discarded suitcases out by the trash. The story she has to tell of how her bag was lost and found, and how United Airlines dealt with her case, is enough to make you never check a bag again. Szybala had taken her first international trip in several years -- a month abroad -- and was flying back to D.C.'s Reagan Airport on December 28. She had bought an Airtag -- Apple's tracking device -- especially for the trip. "I'd heard that it was a thing," she says of 2022's travel trend of putting tracking devices in luggage to find bags in the event that they get lost. "I had a layover scheduled, so I knew the potential for the bag to get lost was high."<br/>