DOCKSIDE

Your bags are almost certainly in this building.

Nearly every bag reported missing in the luggage debark hall turns up in the same two places. Work through these in order and do not skip one because it seems unlikely — the unlikely one is usually it.

1. Where are you right now?

The full guide: where to look, in order

WHY IT HAPPENS

Your bag is handled a dozen times between your cabin door and the floor of the luggage debark hall (the room in the terminal where bags are laid out by tag number): corridor, lift, cage, ramp, cage again, then laid out by hand. It is a paper tag and a bit of string doing all that work.

Tags come off. That is the whole mystery. A bag with no number cannot be laid out under a number, so it goes somewhere else — which is exactly where you are about to look.

Where to look, in order

The lost luggage area

Along the walls of the luggage debark hall, under a banner with a luggage symbol on it. This is where every bag that lost its tag ends up. Start here — it is the single most likely place your bag is standing right now.

Have photos? Say so now.

If you photographed your bags before you handed them over, that changes everything. We can put those pictures in front of every agent working the luggage debark hall within minutes, instead of thirty people searching for "a navy blue roller, about this big."

Tell the porter who comes to you, or show any agent the photos on your phone — do that before you carry on searching.

The other numbers

Walk the rows. A bag that still has its tag can end up laid out one number over, or mixed into a stack that went out together. It is not common and it is not nothing — look before you decide it is gone.

Ask a debarkation agent

Any of them, not a specific desk. They do this every week, they know which cages came off late and which ones are still coming, and they will take it from there. Ask early rather than after an hour of looking.

Fill out the lost luggage form

If it is not in the luggage debark hall, this is the step that starts a real search. An agent will give you the form and tell you what happens next. Do not leave the building without doing it — a bag reported from the luggage debark hall is a different problem from one reported from the airport.

Next time: two things, five minutes

Neither of these helps you today, and both of them would have. Do them before the next sailing while you still remember standing here.

●

Put a tracker inside every checked bag

Inside, not clipped to the outside where it comes off in a chute. Switched on and charged before you sail. A few dollars, and it turns "somewhere in Texas" into a dot on a map. It is the single best money you will spend on luggage.

Where to get one

●

Photograph every bag and its tag

Thirty seconds at the cabin door. A photo ends the conversation that a description cannot even start.

The full last-night checklist

Found it, but it is damaged? Report it

Dockside cannot search for, hold or release luggage. The debarkation agents and your cruise line own that process — what we can do is get a porter to you and get your photos in front of the people looking.