How WestJet, LATAM, and My Credit Card
Taught Me Humility (and Took My Birkenstocks Hostage).

Picture this: it's New Year's Eve in Buenos Aires, I'm walking out of the hotel in a nice shirt, decent pants, and… flip-flops. Not the cool European leather-sandal kind. The slappy kind. The "I lost a bet" kind. Meanwhile, somewhere between Cancún and who-knows-where, my Birkenstocks, my formal shoes, my runners, and a small mountain of Metamucil are having a vacation of their very own.

This is the story of how three suitcases went missing for seventeen days, how I learned the hard way what "48-hour coverage window" means in credit-card fine print, and why — after decades of travel with zero incidents — the universe decided it was time to take me down a peg.

What's coming: a cautionary tale, a Dunning-Kruger cameo, and exactly $166 of spite-suitcase I'll never get back.

The Confidence Before the Fall

Quick preface: Irena and I have been traveling for decades. Enough flights, enough countries, enough close calls that we thought we had the rhythm of it down. Turns out there's a word for that feeling — Dunning-Kruger. Look it up. It's me. It's this whole post.

We'd scored a great fare from Edmonton down to South America with a layover in Cancún and a connection through Mexico City. Two families: me, Irena, our two kids; our friend and her two kids. Seven people, three checked bags, and the kind of easy confidence that gets punished by travel gods.

"Do We Have to Pick Up Our Luggage Anywhere?"

At YEG, the WestJet app refused to check us in, so we did it old-school at the counter. The agent was friendly — genuinely helpful, the kind of desk agent you thank twice. I asked her the question you're supposed to ask: "Do we need to collect our luggage at any point on this trip? We're going through Mexico to South America."

She checked her screen. Showed us the tags. "No, it's ticketed all the way through to your final destination."

Beautiful. One less thing.

Through security, we met up with our friend. Turns out she'd asked the same question, separately, and been told the same thing. Two data points. Case closed. We boarded feeling smug.

What actually happened is we strolled through customs, bags-free and breezy, and walked toward our next gate while our three suitcases sat patiently at the WestJet desk in Cancún, waiting for someone to remember them.

Saved by Strangers (and the Spanish PA System)

The domestic terminal was chaos. Announcements bouncing off every wall, all in Spanish, all of them background noise to me. I tuned them out the way you tune out an airport.

Fortunately, some fellow travelers — smarter and better than me, clearly — heard our last names being called and physically pushed through the crowd to tell us. Strangers. Doing the Lord's work. If you're reading this: thank you. You saved us hours we didn't know we were about to lose.

We ran back. The WestJet rep at the desk said the magic phrase every traveler wants to hear and should never quite trust: "Don't worry, we'll put it on the next flight. It'll meet you in Mexico City and travel with you on the same plane to your final destination."

Hearts pounding, but okay. Okay. This is fine.

Mexico City: The "No Record" Desk

We land in Mexico City. Go straight to the LATAM counter to confirm our bags are on our onward flight. The agent types, frowns, types again. "We have no record of your luggage."

It was December 24th. Christmas Eve. Their computer claim system was down, so we filled out the old-school carbon-copy Property Irregularity Reports by hand — three of them. The agent gave us a WhatsApp number, a reference number, and the most reassuring sentence of the trip: "The bags will probably arrive on the 26th. The 25th is Christmas — nothing moves."

We flew on to our final destination with the clothes on our backs, no toothbrushes, no shorts, no sandals — in a country that was a beautiful, sweaty warm. The one shop open that night was a corner-store-slash-drugstore, where we bought the essentials: toothpaste, deodorant, the deeply humbling travel starter kit.

Boxing Day: The First Shopping Trip That Wasn't a Vacation

Morning of the 26th. No bags. WhatsApp message: "Tomorrow. Definitely tomorrow."

Before we started buying anything, I called our credit card company — the card we'd booked the flights on. Asked about luggage-delay coverage. The rep was warm, confident, crystal clear: "Keep all your receipts. You're covered up to $2,000 for replacement essentials."

So instead of sightseeing, we went shopping. Shorts, T-shirts, swimsuits, the slappy flip-flops, basics for the kids. Not fun shopping. Grim, functional, "we need clean underwear" shopping.

The 27th came. WhatsApp: "We have two of the three bags. Not sure where the third one is. Tomorrow."

The 28th. "Tomorrow."

The 29th. "Tomorrow."

You see where this is going. Every single day, a WhatsApp message that sounded like a hostage video written by a chatbot. "Will arrive tomorrow." "Where would you like it delivered?" "All three located." "Two located." Contradictions stacked on contradictions. By day four we stopped believing any of it.

So we kept buying. Slowly, reluctantly, because New Year's Eve was coming and I still believed — against all evidence — that my suitcase with my Birkenstocks and my good shoes would roll in at the last minute like the hero of a bad rom-com.

It did not.

The Footwear Situation (As Promised)

I searched that city for shoes. I'm not a standard size in a country where I am a standard size, let alone one where I'm not. No formal shoes. No decent runners. Nothing.

So on NYE — the night I wrote about last time, the best New Year's of our lives — I walked out of the hotel in a new shirt, new semi-fancy pants, and the $12 flip-flops I'd bought on Boxing Day. Remember when I said I looked like "450,000 bucks instead of a million"? Now you know. It was the footwear. Walking the pier, dancing till 3:30 a.m., limbo-stick conga lines — all of it in slappy flip-flops that were trying to murder my feet by midnight.

The Suitcase Finally Shows Up (Spoiler: Briefly)

The day before we flew home, the bags arrived. Seventeen days after we'd last seen them. Seventeen. By that point we'd spent a little over $4,300 on replacements and bought an entire extra suitcase to haul the new wardrobe home — $166 CAD in oversize-bag fees on the flight back, because of course.

But hey, we thought. Insurance will cover it. Right?

Cut to Edmonton International. Three missing bags, two on the carousel. The third? Gone again. This time we'd physically grabbed it off the belt in Mexico City, re-checked it ourselves at the counter (trust? dead. buried.), and somehow LATAM-or-WestJet managed to lose the same suitcase a second time. It showed up in Edmonton three days later like a cat that had wandered off to think about its life choices.

The Insurance Two-Step (Or, How I Lost $3,100)

Attempt 1: LATAM. Their policy said the arriving carrier handles the claim — that's them. The website pointed me to a WhatsApp number like it was doing me a favor. I wrote a careful, detailed message. Claim reference, timeline, receipts, the whole professional package.

Day 1: nothing. Day 2: nothing. Day 3: a polite follow-up from me. Day 4: nothing. Day 5: a distinctly less polite follow-up from me. Day 6: the silence of a thousand unread messages.

I was basically texting an ex. At one point I checked to see if the little "delivered" checkmarks had turned blue just to feel something.

Eventually I went back into the LATAM site, clicked through a completely different menu path, and discovered — plot twist — a second WhatsApp number. A secret one. The real one. The one where humans live. I copy-pasted my entire sad saga to the new number and got a reply the next morning: "No problem, please provide details." Hope! Briefly! Fleetingly! Like a hummingbird in a hurricane!

Seventeen days of "tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow" followed by "sorry, too late." Shoutout to whoever designed that customer service flow. You've built something truly special.

Attempt 2: The credit card. Back to the company that had so warmly told me "keep all your receipts." I filed online, uploaded every single receipt, wrote out the timeline. Four days later, the verdict came back:

$1,200 and change. Out of the $4,300 we'd spent.

The reason, buried deep in the fine print of that card, the part nobody reads until it bites them: coverage was limited to the first 48 hours of the delay. The 25th (everything closed) and the 26th (the Boxing Day grim-shop). Everything after that? Rejected. The slow-bleed replacements across days 3 through 16, when LATAM was still WhatsApping me "tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow"? On us.

We were out roughly $3,100. We'd spent a little over $4,300 all-in — replacement clothes and essentials for three people across seventeen days, plus that glorious $166 spite-suitcase — and the credit card graciously handed us back $1,200 and change, the financial equivalent of a pat on the head and a "better luck next time, champ." My Birkenstocks, wherever they'd been vacationing, had cost me more in absentia than they had to buy.

What I'd Actually Tell a Friend

Some of this is stuff Irena and our daughter already knew and I apparently had to learn the hard way:

• Always pack a swimsuit, a change of clothes, and real underwear in your carry-on. My carry-on had seventeen pairs of underwear, one pair of socks, snacks, and a laptop. Balanced? No. Prepared for a 17-day bag disappearance? Absolutely not.
• In Mexico, collect and re-check your bags at your first Mexican airport. Every time. I don't care what the agent in your home country tells you. I don't care if two agents tell you. Go grab them. The ten minutes at the carousel is cheaper than $3,100.
• Call your credit card company before you travel and ask the specific questions: How long is the coverage window? What's the per-person cap? What receipts do they need? Get it in writing or in an email. The friendly phone rep is not the person who adjudicates your claim.
• Check the airline's claim deadline the day your bag goes missing — not day 10, not day 19. LATAM's was 20 days and I blew it because I was yelling into the wrong WhatsApp channel.
• Screenshot every WhatsApp message, every reference number, every "tomorrow." Not for sympathy. For the paper trail.
• Consider actual standalone travel insurance for any trip longer than a long weekend. Credit card coverage is a nice bonus, not a safety net.

Highlights (If You Can Call Them That)

• Strangers at Cancún airport — heard our names over the PA and physically came to find us. The real heroes of this story.
• Boxing Day in a foreign mall — buying flip-flops instead of seeing the city.
• NYE on the pier in slappy sandals — still the best night of the year.
• The $166 spite-suitcase — now living a quiet retirement in our basement.
• The third bag's encore disappearance — lost a second time at the carousel handoff in Mexico City, like a magic trick nobody asked for.
• Finally understanding "48-hour coverage" — at a cost of roughly $775 per hour of education.

The Honest Take

WestJet's Edmonton agent was lovely and also wrong. LATAM's ground staff were kind and also running a WhatsApp system held together with duct tape and two different phone numbers. The credit card rep was confident and also reading from a script that didn't match the policy. None of them were villains. All of them cost us money.

The lesson isn't "don't trust anyone." The lesson is: verify the thing that matters most, in writing, before you need it. Decades of smooth travel had made me lazy about the boring questions. This trip charged me $3,100 plus a pair of Birkenstocks in tuition.

Coming up next: Behind My Shades — Cancún, Girls' Getaway Edition. Irena's trip, Irena's rules, a completely different pair of shades. Less me complaining about shoes. More cocktails. Stay tuned.