After four months of searching for their lost luggage, a Canadian couple was shocked to discover Air Canada had donated it to charity.
“This is my property that was donated without my consent and without my knowing,” Nakita Rees, an Ontario choreographer and athletic therapist, said on TikTok. “This is wrong, and this is criminal.”
After returning from their honeymoon in Greece, Rees and her husband landed in Montreal, where they were required to recheck their luggage before their final Air Canada flight to Toronto. (RELATED: ‘Not Justified By Science’: Air Canada Blisters Government COVID Restrictions)
“My bag made it back. My husband’s did not,” Rees said. The couple filed a lost bag report, but were grateful they had an Apple AirTag tracker on the suitcase, so they were able to see “the scheme that is now Air Canada.”
After filing the lost bag report, the couple watched their luggage move with the AirTag tracker from the Montreal Airport to a nearby processing center in Montreal, where it sat for four weeks. Rees said they were “frustrated, but not upset,” as they thought it might take time for the suitcase to be processed.
Then the couple watched the suitcase leave on the highway from Montreal to Etobicoke. Rees said she and her husband were “pumped,” assuming the suitcase would return to the Montreal Airport or an overflow storage facility, where they could retrieve it. Instead, the AirTag showed the suitcase appearing in a neighborhood.
“My husband said when he looked at the AirTag tracker it showed up at two different locations, two different houses that were about a street or two apart,” said Rees. Rees’s husband visited the residences to see if the suitcase had turned up but to no avail.
When the couple checked the AirTag again, the suitcase was in a storage facility, where Rees said it sat for three months. “No movement, nothing from Air Canada,” Rees said.
After six different phone calls with Air Canada, in which Rees claimed she was repeatedly “brushed aside,” the couple decided to go to the storage facility themselves.
Rees said her husband “started peering through some doors with his flashlight in the public storage facility until he found the one that was piled floor to ceiling high with luggage.”
It was at this point that the couple got police involved. After obtaining a warrant to investigate, police discovered over 500 pieces of luggage in a storage facility owned by a charity, some of which contained iPhones, laptops, and iPads. Rees said she won’t learn the name of the charity until she pays for the full police report, which she plans to do.
“Cops are unimpressed with how Air Canada is handling this in that they are taking possession and ownership of our property and deciding what needs to be done with it and donating it,” Rees said.
Rees said that the airline only compensated the couple for a quarter’s worth of the value of her husband’s clothes, and did not give her the option of accepting the money because it was e-transferred to her account.
“So I looked into the terms and conditions to see if me accepting compensation changed over ownership to Air Canada, and there’s nothing,” Rees said.
“Our luggage was donated to a charity on behalf of Air Canada because they deemed it lost even though we were tracking our luggage for the last four months,” Rees said. “It was never actually truly lost because we know where it was the entire time.”
Rees urged anyone with missing luggage from Air Canada to keep looking. “If you have an Air Tag and your luggage is still missing, and you can see where it is, it’s not lost. It’s most likely donated,” she said. “Do something about it. Speak up. Email the executives, push, push, push, because they will not do anything or change until enough people start spreading the word.”