In a small Alabama city, the world’s largest purveyor of lost luggage—and the items in them—sees everything from live snakes to Birkin bags. This week on Unpacked, we take a peek inside.
Transcript
Aislyn Greene, host: I’m Aislyn Greene and this is Unpacked, the podcast that unpacks one tricky topic in travel each week. And this week, we’re entering the world of Unclaimed Baggage, aka the lost luggage capital of the world. It’s a store in Scottsboro, Alabama, where they sell suitcases—and the items in them—that can’t be reunited with their owners. And they get a LOT of suitcases—they stock nearly 7,000 new items each day.
Scottsboro is a small city of about 15,000 people, but since entrepreneur Hugo Doyle Owens founded Unclaimed Baggage in 1970, it’s become a legit tourist attraction. So today we’ll hear from Hugo’s son, Bryan Owens, who now stewards the company.
Bryan grew up watching his father build the business, and he shared how that has expanded his world view and how the company gives back in big ways. Bryan also helped create Unclaimed Baggage’s first-ever Found Report, an in-depth review of the more than 2 million items that made their way into the store in 2023. We talked about how they sort through that mass of items, some of the strangest things they found, including live snakes, and what all of these objects reveal about our world right now.
Welcome to Unpacked. Thank you for being here. I’d love to just kind of start with, you know, a question I’m sure you’ve answered a thousand times: What is Unclaimed Baggage?
Bryan Owens: Unclaimed Baggage is a one-of-a-kind business, the only company of its kind in America. It is a retail operation and an online store. And we feature selling things that were lost in transit. So it could be things left on an airplane, things that were checked into the custody of an airline. And we have long-term exclusive contracts and relationships with transportation entities. And we bring those items, sight unseen, from all over the country—and in so many cases around the world—into Scottsboro, Alabama, a town of 15,000 people nestled in between the Appalachian Mountains in the northeastern corner of the state of Alabama.
Aislyn: And how did all of this begin? What’s the origin story?
Bryan: My dad started the company in, in 1970. Uh, he was an insurance salesman and he was a fourth-generation entrepreneur and really wanted to, to have his own business. And he was talking to a friend one morning and he said, “I have more lost bags than I have—I don’t know what to do with them.”
And he was with Trailways Bus Lines, which is one of the two biggest, two largest bus lines back in the day. That’s the way we just kind of live as entrepreneurs. You hear about a need and, and then you think about a way to go and meet that need. So he borrowed $300 from one of my grandfathers and then went off in a borrowed pickup truck from another grandfather and bought his first load of bags.
So you can envision a 1965 Chevy C10 pickup truck just with—heaping over with, with bags in the back of it. He had brought those bags back and they rented an old house just near downtown Scottsboro and opened the contents up and placed them out on card tables, put prices on them and opened the doors to the public. And it was off to the races from the very beginning.
Aislyn: Really? So right away, it was—there was something about that, that captured people’s imagination.
Bryan: It was. It was amazing.
Aislyn: And I mean, the business has evolved quite a bit since then. Could you just tell me a little bit about, about what it is now and how that’s changed from the original card tables?
Bryan: Yeah, yeah. So we sell in primarily two venues, or actually there are three kind of buckets and, and we have tractor trailer loads of lost and unclaimed items that are coming in, um, every week. And, we have a retail store in Scottsboro, Alabama. It, it spans over a city block. People come there to shop from every state in America and 40 countries. And so if you walk in the doors of the store and you’ll be—you’ll walk through a story, kind of entry museum that tells the story of our company, our history, our 54-year history. And you walk into the store and it is brightly lit. Very clean, very organized, lots of fun, lots of energy. And in the store, we stock 7,000 never-seen-before items a day. In the summer of 2020, we, I mean we, even though we have several hundred team members, it still is a family company. I have three sons and my wife, Sharon, is very involved in it.
And our middle son launched our e-commerce business in the summer of 2020 or in the middle of COVID and the governor had us shut down for a few months. And so we, we really needed to innovate and he already had been working on a project to go online and we launched in June of 2020.
And now we have customers from, from all 50 states and over a hundred countries outside of the U.S. And online we stock about 6,000 or so items every week. So it’s, it’s always changing. So that’s one of the things that’s different about us. The store’s always changing.
Aislyn: Yeah, it’s so dynamic. And I’d love to hear more about some of those items. But first, I was curious to know what it was like for you growing up with this store. And like, were there things that you coveted or things that you were able to, you know, bring home as a kid?
Bryan: Yeah. So the company started when I was just in grade school. And it was a family affair with my mom, my dad and my brother and me. And so I worked there afternoons and weekends and summers. Uh, and it was, I didn’t have a, a frame of reference at that point—as a young man, probably 9 or 10 years old—but I had no frame of reference for what that was like starting a company. I wouldn’t have called it this back then, but it was a rush to see the people that were just piling into the store. It was fascinating.
And it also, you have to understand, I was living, grew up in the small town in Scottsboro. And so I didn’t really have a huge world exposure, but it really brought the world to me, in the sense of, we’re seeing bags that come from all over the world, and people tend to take their best things with them when they travel. And so, it gave me a perspective that was much broader than what I was used to. The kinds of things people put in their bags, and the kinds of books that they read, uh, the types of cameras that they were using, which were very different back then than now.
Aislyn: Absolutely. Well, here is another question that I know comes up a lot, but how is it that so many people cannot be reunited with their things, especially if it’s, you know, the best that they have?
Bryan: The airlines—and then bear in mind that we really, we deal with more than just airlines—I call it the world of Trains, Planes, and Automobiles, uh, and one of my favorite movies.
Aislyn: Yes.
Bryan: But take for example the airlines, I mean they, they really do a great job in returning people’s lost bags to them. A fraction of a percent of all the bags that are actually shipped end up lost. Most people get their bags back—they’re delayed, they’re back on the next flight or, or they’re sitting on your doorstep the next morning. But the way the process works is, typically for the first few days, the people in the airports for the airline, they actually do the tracing work. They’re trying to find the owner and most things, they get placed back with the passengers pretty quickly. Then after a few days, they tend to have—most airlines have a specialized team that takes over and they get into very intensive, more comprehensive thorough baggage tracing.
So at the end of the day, there are still items that are left over. Items that maybe don’t have, uh, passenger ID, uh, on them. And they’ve not been able to place those items back with the owners. And so during that tracing process, which I think is, uh, by industry standard is, is about 90 days, they will either find the bag or pay off their claims. And so, at that point, then, after 90 days, then the airline has to do something with it. And so, that’s where we step in. We’re all about giving a second life, uh, to these items.
And that’s, that’s done through, really, there’s, there’s kind of three big buckets that I started to allude to earlier. About a third of the items, we’re going to recycle and about a third, we will sell in either in the bricks-and-mortar retail store in Scottsboro, Alabama, or we’ll sell, uh, online at unclaimedbaggage.com. Then that last third, those are items that we give a second life to them through our, our foundation, Reclaimed for Good, that get donated to some pretty large charities.
Aislyn: Amazing. And how do you decide what ends up in the store or online? Do you have a whole team that’s kind of assessing each bag as it comes in?
Bryan: There’s a discussion about that often.
Aislyn: Really?
Bryan: Yes. You can, you can imagine because all these items come into one warehouse facility, think of it almost like uh, reverse manufacturing process as well, as what we’re doing is, is, you know, we’re not building things, we’re taking bags and breaking them apart and we’re mining for value really down to the, to the smallest item. And they’re often, I think we would have, uh, maybe animated or spirited conversations about, “OK, which channels should this, should this go in?”
Aislyn: Is there one object that you remember seeing a particularly spirited conversation about?
Bryan: Well, we’ve actually had, gosh, I think two or three, uh, Birkin handbags this year so, “Do we put those online, do we put them in the store?” And it’s a fun thing, it’s like, “Wow, this is a very, it’s a $25,000 handbag.” And I can’t imagine even carrying something like that out in public.
Aislyn: I know, let alone packing it in a suitcase that is going to be separated from you for a long period of time.
Bryan: Yes. Yep. Yes.
Aislyn: That is a, it’s a different way of living, I think.
Bryan: Mm hmm. It is. Yes. We will both agree that, that, uh, we can’t quite relate to that.
Aislyn: You have other relationships that you mentioned. It’s kind of like a trains, planes, and automobiles. So you have relationships with airlines. Do you also have relationships with companies like Amtrak?
Bryan: We literally get items from trains, bus lines. Think about hospitality, resorts. I mean, every week thousands and thousands of items come through our door. And it’s a little bit, what’s really cool is, is, it’s a little bit like Christmas every day. You never know what you’re going to find.
Aislyn: And you have found some rather unique things over the years and you just released your first annual Found Report. So I was hoping you could tell me a little bit about that report and then about some of the more unusual things that you have discovered and slash sold.
Bryan: Yeah, we did just publish our first, what we hope to be an annual report called the Found Report. And it’s really cool because we have a view into the world of lost and found that no one else has. And we’re seeing, if you think about it, just over the course of a year, millions of items that, uh, when you start breaking these bags down or boxes of items that are lost and found items. We’ve had two live snakes—
Aislyn: Oh my God.
Bryan: —uh, come through bags this year. I do remember one of them was an African sand boa.
Aislyn: Wow.
Bryan: And we called the, the local animal patrol or whatever.
Aislyn: You’re not selling those.
Bryan: Yeah, we’re not selling those. I mentioned we had, we had two Hermes bags that came in, Birkin bags that are just amazing; 19 Rolex watches over the past year. Those don’t usually last very long. A life-size Winnie the Pooh.
Aislyn: In a suitcase?
Bryan: Yeah, absolutely. Yes, it’s a big suitcase, I guess, right?
Aislyn: That must have been, like, the only thing in that suitcase.
Bryan: Yeah. A Halloween card that was, uh, signed by President Richard Nixon back in the, the ’80s. It really spans the gamut. A hand-painted ostrich egg from South Africa. We’ve had multiple hoverboards come through. People leave their hoverboards on an airplane. Can you think about that one? Uh, a diamond tennis necklace that was worth, uh, $35,000.
Aislyn: Oh my goodness. That person must have been crying.
Bryan: We’ve had some fabulous pieces of jewelry. And one of the unique things about jewelry for us is that we actually, when we, when we started the online business, we weren’t sure if people would buy fine jewelry online. But we’re a company that’s been around now for 54 years, so it’s easy to check us out to figure out if we’re legit.
And so it actually surprised me, uh, how people, our customer base was willing to buy jewelry online, and jewelry, I think, is maybe the big category where we dual list things. So you can come look at it in the store if you would like, but we also have it listed online.
Aislyn: And you must have like appraisers that you work with that help you identify value of books or jewelry and things like that, right?
Bryan: Yeah, we have in-house experts that know how to value and appraise things up to a certain point and then after that, if we’re not comfortable with that and if it’s an expensive item, then we go out to a gemologist and get a certified appraisal on the items. The same thing is true, if you think about it, there’s a lot of counterfeit goods out there—think about sneakers and designer handbags, Louis Vuitton handbags and things—and so we have to, we go through a lot of trouble. We have a whole department that’s just devoted to authentication, and so when you buy something from us, I mean, you can rest assured that it’s the real deal. And if it’s an expensive item, oftentimes, you’ll have the authentication papers that will come with it.
Aislyn: I mean, that trust, it’s a huge part of your appeal, I think. Was there anything about kind of the Found Report that you feel like commented on the state of the world in 2023?
Bryan: Yes, absolutely. And I like that question. Unclaimed Baggage has always been like an archeological dig. At any point in history, in our history, you can just take them by slices: Back when we first started, there was no such thing as cell phones. And then there was the whole Walkman phase, uh, that came along. And then boom boxes and things like that. And now we see tons and tons of electronics that we get. E-readers and Kindles are, are one of the top items that we see that, that, that come through. We get an abundance of headphones that come in, either like over-the-ear Bose headphones or, or the Apple over-the-ear headphones. Tons and tons of AirPods. I just, you think about, I mean, they’re really valuable, but they’re small and they’re easy to lose.
Aislyn: Yeah. Easy to tuck somewhere and not realize that you’ve put them there.
Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, it really is fascinating to me to walk through, when I see these bags being opened up and to see the kinds of things that are coming out of them. When I look and see the things that we have listed online, when I walk through the store, it really is kind of a cultural commentary on how we’re living, particularly in the Western world.
Aislyn: Absolutely. And then there’s just the kind of like, individual portrait of what somebody’s suitcase says about them, right? You know, like I imagine that you can almost put together a picture of a person based on what’s in their luggage.
Bryan: Absolutely. I love that word “picture” there. We’ve always said, “If these bags could talk, what a story they would have to tell.” And, yeah, we have some personas that we’ve developed over the years. And you kind of imagine what this person was like. But we’ve had some really unique things that have come through. Some things that are not like personal items, from a suitcase.
I remember when we, we bought the company, my wife and I bought the company from my parents and my brother, who really laid the foundation, uh, for the company and we bought the company in 1995. And as we were kind of sorting through the business and looking at inventory and I remember being back in one of our warehouses and there was this large shockproof shipping container and I’m like, “Well, what is in that?”
So we opened it up and the item that was in there was suspended by rubber grommets so it couldn’t touch anything suspended inside this case. And then we peeled back some of the packing on it and I promise you it said this, it said, “The Department of the U.S. Navy, handle with extreme caution, I’m worth my weight in gold.”
Aislyn: What?
Bryan: Yeah, it was crazy and turns out it was a guidance system for an F14 fighter plane and I think it was also used in the V22 Osprey. And so you go back in history a little bit and you think about, “OK, so we used to be allies with Iran and before the Shah fell.” Uh, back in the, what was it, late ’70s, early ’80s, and, and so we sold them a lot of military equipment, including F14 fighter planes. And of course, once that relationship got severed, then they had these fighter jets and things and no access to parts for them. So we got a knock on our door one day from the, I think it was the Naval Criminal Investigative Services branch, and they were like, “You, you have this, uh, item here that we need to get back from you.”
And I called my lawyer to begin with it. I’m like, “OK, uh, Robert, what do we, uh, what do I do?” He said, “Give it to them.”
Aislyn: “Don’t even, don’t even try to argue.”
Bryan: Yeah, but as we began to unpack that story, if you will, it turns out that the story was going around the military that the Iranians had stolen it because they needed the parts.
Aislyn: Oh.
Bryan: And um, actually, no, it was sitting in a warehouse in Scottsboro, Alabama—
Aislyn: —maybe about to be sold.
Bryan: Yeah, right, it’s like, what do we do with this? It’s too big to be a paperweight.
Aislyn: That’s so funny, that they’re thinking the worst. And of course it’s just sitting there and no harm is going to come.
Bryan: Yes. Yeah. Maybe to, to narrow that—we had a camera that was on the Space Shuttle that came through. It was a Nikon camera. We got, got that back to NASA.
Aislyn: Oh, cool.
Bryan: Several years ago.
Aislyn: Yeah, I was going to ask, are items ever reunited with their owners because they happen to see them or it’s something like that, you know, you’re like, “Oh, this needs to get back.” But someone who sees it online or in the store and says, “Oh, that’s my tennis bracelet.”
Bryan: You would think it would happen more often than it does, and the story that I can think of is, every year we have an annual snow skiing equipment sale, and it’s always on the first Saturday in November. People come the night before and camp out in the parking lot. It’s a lot of fun. We’re set up to accommodate them and have bonfires and things and, and s’mores and pizza and, and show movies that are, very, uh, family oriented.
So now fast-forward, after one of our ski sales, we had a pair of women’s ski boots, snow skiing boots. And we had a guy from Atlanta came in the store one day and he was looking around and he came, he got to the sporting goods section and he looked at the ski boots that, that I’m referencing. And he thought, “You know, I’m going to get those for my girlfriend and take them back to her.”
And, and so he bought them from us and took them back to her and, and she looked at him quizzically, with an expression of astonishment on her face, and then she kind of pulled back the tongue of the ski boot and deep inside the boot was her name written inside the boot.
So her boots had been lost, the airlines paid her for the loss of her boots. They made their way to Scottsboro, Alabama, and her boyfriend bought those boots and then brought them right back to her.
Aislyn: That is amazing that he just sensed those boots are the boots for her.
Bryan: Yes.
Aislyn: But it’s funny that it doesn’t happen more often than it does.
Bryan: Yeah. If you come in the store, it’s, it’s a vast amount of product. And online. I mean, it’s, we do, typically two big drops a week on Thursdays and Sundays. And then smaller drops online throughout the week and so, but there are thousands of items to sort through and to check out and—
Aislyn: It’d be a little bit of a needle in a haystack to try to find, yeah, yeah.
Bryan: Yep.
Aislyn: Have you seen any change in the number of items or suitcases with the advent of things like AirTags or, you know, related technology?
Bryan: Hmm, good question. The short answer is, is that the volume of items that we have, it’s probably as much as we’ve ever had. Well, the whole revenge travel thing that is, you know, people are still traveling from, from that pent-up demand they had during COVID. And so we have more product than we’ve ever had.
Aislyn: And I’m curious—’cause you have such a strong fan base and people are so, I think, enthralled when they hear about your company—philosophically speaking, why do you think that we are so drawn to this idea?
Bryan: I think there’s kind of a psychographic that comes into play. We don’t really have a demographic of shoppers. It’s really more of a psychographic. Like, for example, if you come to the store, you’ll see beat-up pickup trucks in the parking lot, and you’ll see Teslas and Mercedes.
The thing that they have in common is they all love the thrill of the hunt, going through and digging and looking for some treasure. And what’s a treasure to one person, might not be a treasure to another person.
Aislyn: So it’s kind of this, the search, you know, and that quest, the idea of a quest.
Bryan: And our market research shows that people will come in looking for one thing. But if they don’t find that, they find something else that they’re fascinated with. And so people rarely walk out, uh, disappointed or, or without something that they wanted to take home.
Aislyn: Yeah, yeah. Well, and I believe it’s one of the top tourist attractions in Alabama. Do people specifically travel to Alabama to go to the store?
Bryan: Oh yeah. I’m over there a lot. I’m, I’m at the store, store a lot myself. I love it. It is, you know, God’s great blessing in our lives to be stewards of this big business that, that serves people really all over the world in, in, in many respects. I was there just in the parking lot last week and cars from, from Oregon, cars from New York state, cars from Alaska, of all places. So, it, it’s fascinating to, to see how people come to this store.
Aislyn: What would you say that you’ve learned about humanity over the years as a steward of this business?
Bryan: In this world, particularly, there’s a bit of a bifurcation in our economy right now, and it’s kind of some things that we need to reckon with. But I can tell you this, people are looking for ways to stretch their dollar. They want to be able to buy great stuff and things they’re proud of, but, you know, they don’t want to go out and pay retail for them.
And there’s this whole macro trend now of people are—especially among Gen-Zers and millennials—that people love to buy secondhand items. The whole world of, of re-commerce is, is big and, I mean, we’ve been doing re-commerce since 1970.
Aislyn: Yeah. I mean, when you look at some of the statistics of how many items there are out in the world, and how much is generated, one of those things that seems more important than ever to, you know, not necessarily always consume new. So it’s cool that you guys have been doing that since before it was a buzzword.
Bryan: Yeah. Giving a second life to these items.
Aislyn: Well, you mentioned earlier that this was also something that expanded your worldview as a, as a child. Has it continued to do so over the years?
Bryan: It does expand my worldview. Just walking through the store ’cause I get to meet people. It’s really fascinating to see people come through and, and they’ve had it on their bucket list. We were covered back in the, I think it was the fall of actually 1995, and Oprah Winfrey featured us. She had a professional shopper doing a live satellite uplink with Oprah in the studio when she was still doing her show and there are people that saw us on Oprah that they put it on their bucket list and now, almost 30 years later, they’ll make the trip.
Aislyn: Yeah, you’re a pilgrimage site now.
Bryan: Yeah. It’s crazy in Scottsboro, Alabama. It’s, it’s a town of 15,000 people.
Aislyn: Amazing. You mentioned Reclaimed for Good earlier, how is that part of your mission to help support people in need?
Bryan: Our purpose is to, to redeem the lost, unclaimed, and rejected. And we do that through giving these items a second life. About a third of all the items that come in, we actually donate to, we have these established charity partnerships. I can give you a couple of examples. This week, I think, is National Foster Care and Adoption Week. And, we have a program called Love Luggage that, it’s really, really cool. We’ll take hard-sided suitcases and then we’ll set up at a, it could be at a university, it could be at a, at a community center or, or a high school and you’ll have affinity clubs and, and organizations, and their people will come in and they’ll hand-paint suitcases for foster children.
Because foster kids typically carry their belongings from one location to another in a garbage bag. And we want them to be able to feel maybe a little bit more dignity as they go from one place to another. We’ve done that all over America. At our 50th anniversary, we did a 50-state road show and we went to all 50 states and in many states we did Love Luggage events
The couple of other examples that I love to talk about is think about eyeglasses and sunglasses. Those are easy to lose, right, but hard to match back up. If I’m talking to you and trying to explain my eyeglasses to you, it’s not easy to do.
Aislyn: Could be a million pairs.
Bryan: Yes. And we get millions of pairs. And we have, indeed, donated to the Lions Club International over a million pairs of glasses. They have a program. Their charity is called Sight First. And so they take eyeglasses, and they have a team of optometrists and opticians, and they’ll go into countries, primarily outside the U.S., and they’ll provide vision care for them.
We get a ton of sunglasses that we donate to the Lions Club, and they’ll take those down to the countries along the equator, because the agricultural workers oftentimes they won’t have sunglasses, can’t afford them. And prolonged exposure to sunlight, you get cataracts from that, even as a young person, so we’re able to give these farm workers sunglasses through the Lions Club.
And then the other example that I love to talk about is, believe it or not, there are a lot of wheelchairs that come through Unclaimed Baggage. And it’s not so much that the airlines are, are losing those, but they’re oftentimes damaged in shipment.
So, you think about if you’re a disabled person, you go onto the airplane and you check your wheelchair into the custody of the airline, that, you know, they don’t fit neatly and nicely like a suitcase would. They don’t stack well. And so, they sometimes get, just get damaged just by the very, very nature of their shapes.
And so we get lots and lots of wheelchairs that come through and we donate those to, uh, to an organization called Wheels for the World. And those wheelchairs go into, to a couple of prisons and the prisoners go take them into a shop and, and then they recondition them and then rebuild them. And they were like brand new. And then those get—through Wheels for the World, those go all over the world to disabled children and to disabled adults as well.
Aislyn: That is incredible. What do you see as the future of the business?
Bryan: Well, I’m the fifth generation involved in entrepreneurship and my family, we have three sons that are involved in the company in various ways. And, uh, a fourth generation that are younger. And, my vision is really a hundred-year vision for the company. I mean, it’s a fascinating business that we’ve been entrusted with. And our intentions is, as long as we’re given the strength and ability to do so, is to keep building the business because we get to do a ton of good.
I mean we have people that come in the store that it’s just, it’s therapy for them. And we’re really big on Southern hospitality, so when people come in the door, they’re greeted, and it’s a very fun, happy place for people to come.
And our own community there, we get to really have an impact as one of the largest employers in our area, and to be able to provide meaningful employment for people. And then, of course, the, just the, the giving back efforts that we do through Reclaim for Good. We have to make a profit, stay in business, but it’s a lot more than about that.
Aislyn: Yeah. Well, my very last question for you, do you have any tips for people to help keep their luggage out of Unclaimed Baggage?
Bryan: My, my wife laughs at me. We’re about to go on a trip, an anniversary trip, and so, uh, when I pack my bag, as I’m stacking things inside the bag, I take photos of the items inside my bag, so that if, in the very unlikely event that it gets mishandled or lost, then I have, proof of, of what I had inside the bag.
Heartily, strongly recommend that you put good identification inside your bag as well as on the outside of your bag. If you can, put a copy of your travel itinerary inside the bag. Sometimes if I’m traveling overseas, I’ll put a copy of my passport inside the bag. And sometimes people forget, we’re somewhat transient as a society. May live in an apartment for a few years and then you move to a new apartment or move to a house or condo or whatever and you forget and you leave your ID on your bag from the previous location and so often those forwarding instructions aren’t there, so make sure you have your current address on your bag.
Aislyn: Well, thank you. This has been an illuminating conversation and I’m looking forward to my own first visit to Unclaimed Baggage.
Bryan: We’d love to have you. So are you based on the West Coast?
Aislyn: I am. Yeah. I’m in California. I’m in your market.
Bryan: OK. Hey, it’s great to talk to you. And I hope you have a great rest of your week.
Aislyn: Thank you, you too.
And that was Bryan Owens. Thank you, Bryan. And that is the marvel that is Unclaimed Baggage. I can’t wait to visit in person one of these days. You can find out more about the company at unclaimedbaggage.com and on social media—we’ll link to everything, including their 2023 Found Report, in our show notes. And if you’ve ever visited the store, let us know what you bought! We’ll see you next week.
Ready for more unpacking? Visit afar.com, and be sure to follow us on Instagram and Twitter. The magazine is @afarmedia. If you enjoyed today’s exploration, I hope you’ll come back for more great stories. Subscribing makes this easy! You can find Unpacked on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. And be sure to rate and review the show. It helps other travelers find it. We also want to hear from you: Is there a travel dilemma, trend, or topic you’d like us to explore? Drop us a line at afar.com/feedback or email us at unpacked@afar.com.
This has been Unpacked, a production of AFAR Media. The podcast is produced by Aislyn Greene and Nikki Galteland. Music composition by Chris Colin.
And remember: The world is complicated. We’re here to help you unpack it.
