Track down

Track down

To track down is to find someone or something after a very thorough search.

When you use “track down,” you know what you’re looking for. It’s not usually close by. You might have to look in a lot of different places. It takes a lot of effort. You can track down a person or you can track down a thing.

Let’s start with a thing. If you travel on an airplane, and if the airline loses your checked bag , then the airline tries to find it. Often, it’s just coming on the next flight to your city. Often, it’s easy to find. It will be at your airport in a couple of hours. That’s the most common scenario.

But sometimes, something happens, and your bag winds up in another place. And there might have been a mistake, it might not have gotten scanned in, the tag with the barcode might have fallen off or gotten damaged, there might have been a weather delay somewhere. And so in these rare cases, the airline will track your bags down. They will search. They will make calls. They will look in a lot of places. They will go to a lot of effort to find your bag. And with any luck, they’ll be able to track it down. With any luck, they’ll find it after a thorough search.

It’s common to use “track down” with documents. If you travel for work, you might have to save your receipts and submit them to get reimbursed. I used to have to submit receipts to get reimbursed from my health insurance. You might need to save receipts to keep business records or get tax deductions.

If you’re really organized, you’ll have all your receipts in a folder somewhere. But if you’re like me, you have to track them down when you need them. Did I save those files to my desktop? Are they in my downloads folder? Did I take a picture with my phone? Are they still in my email? Did I delete them—and do I have to log into a website to get a new copy? Or, worse, do I have request a new copy from someone else?

Sometimes, I would have to call hotels and get them to email me receipts from my visit weeks or months prior. This is tracking down a document. I would search my emails, search my downloads folder, search my temporary files, and sometimes I’d have to ask someone to send me the file. This is a thorough search. I was tracking those documents down.

Police might investigate a crime, maybe something that happened with a car. They might see a video that shows a car with a license plate. Their job is to track down the vehicle. They have to do a thorough search for that car. They have the license plate number, so they can find the owner. Sometimes that’s not enough; the car’s owner might not be living at the registered address. Maybe the car was stolen. Maybe the car was registered to an elderly person and the person’s son or daughter uses it. This is effort: the police have to track down the vehicle. They have to find it and it requires a thorough search.

Close your eyes (not if you’re driving!) close your eyes and think about your circle of friends when you were, say, seven or eight years old. Now imagine you want to get in touch with one of those friends. Would it be easy? For some of you, it might be easy. But I suspect that some of you might have to track those friends down.

They might have changed their names, if they got married. They might have moved out of state. They might have common names. You might not be connected on social media. I’m thinking back. I’m not in close touch with many people from my hometown. If I wanted to find people I was friends with long ago, I’d have to track them down. I’d have to search. I’d have to ask people, friends of friends. It would not be easy.

See you next time!

That’s all for the audio lesson this Thursday. Hey, I’ve got some news for you. The months of July and August are usually slow in the northern hemisphere, with kids out of school and summer vacations. In parts of Europe, they take all of August off!

And I have some projects at Plain English that I want to do, so I’m going to do something interesting. It’s going to be called “Summer Break.” And so what I’m going to do is this. We’re still going to do new lessons for all of July and August. But we’re going to make them a little lighter, a little easier.

The topics are all going to be about culture in the U.S. The first two episodes of Summer Break are going to be about east coast living and west coast living. What are the differences, what are the pros and cons, of living on the east coast versus living on the west coast?

Those are going to start in two weeks, with the episode on July 1. And they’ll go until the end of August. They’ll all be a little different. This will be a little easier on me because I won’t have to do quite as much research on the topics and I can prepare them in advance.

Next week, we’ll have two normal episodes. And then our Summer Break episodes will start up on July 1. See you on Monday!

Have you ever wondered what happens to your bag when the airline loses it?

Lesson summary

Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics. And sometimes, instead of a current event, I just pick something that interests me. And that’s what we’re doing today.

I got to wondering. When an airline loses a suitcase, and despite its best efforts, it can’t match the suitcase with its owner, then what happens to the bag? What happens to all the stuff in it? And so today’s story here at Plain English is the answer to that question.

In the second half of the audio lesson, I’ll show you what it means to track something down (or track someone down).

This is lesson number 685, so that means JR, the producer, has uploaded the transcripts, exercises, and full lesson resources to PlainEnglish.com/685.

What happens to the world’s lost suitcases?

Last year, about nine billion passengers flew in a commercial airplane. Almost all of those passengers would have carried some kind of luggage—either carry-on bags or checked bags.

Over ninety-nine percent of those passengers walked out of their destination airport with their bags. But some of them—and this has happened to a lot of us, at some point—some of those passengers did not get their bags at their destination.

Airlines today are very good at delivering luggage. The airline industry says that 99.5 percent of checked bags do not get lost. That leaves only half a percent of bags that don’t make it to their destination as scheduled—and, around the world, that adds up . It’s about 25 million bags.

The vast majority of those get reunited with passengers within a couple of days, often within 24 hours. Airlines are good at tracking down lost bags: all bags have a tag and a barcode, and often, passengers can track their lost bags on their phones. In a minority of cases, airlines have to track down lost bags in far-flung cities.

Still, not every single one of those 25 million lost bags is reunited with its owner—worldwide, about eight out of every one thousand lost bags never makes it back to its rightful owner. These bags are just totally lost. So what happens next?

National regulations and international treaties say that airlines must compensate passengers for lost bags: that simply means, the airlines have to pay passengers. But that still doesn’t answer the question of what happens to the bags.

All those bags are somewhere in the system—usually unclaimed at an airport. Airlines store them in warehouses. They attempt to find the owner. They hold the bags for a while, in case the owner shows up to claim them. But after three months, the airlines give up on finding the rightful owners. This is where it gets interesting.

In most developed countries, the airlines are required to hold onto bags for three months. After that, they sell, auction, or donate lost bags. They don’t hold onto them forever.

There are two approaches to auctioning lost property: one is to sell the bags full of stuff, and the other is to open the bags and sell the property in categories.

In the United States, the airlines are responsible for disposing of lost bags. And the airlines have exclusive contracts with a single store to buy the lost luggage.

The store is called “Unclaimed Baggage” and it’s located in a small town in the state of Alabama. They have about a 5,000 square-meter showroom, which is like a department store full of abandoned property. There’s a section for clothes, a section for accessories, a section for electronics, watches, and much more.

Unclaimed Baggage buys suitcases, usually paying a flat fee per case or per kilogram. Company employees open the bags and sort the items. Everything inside falls into one of three categories: sell, donate, or recycle or throw away.

If it’s clothing, the company washes the items itself: it has the largest commercial laundry facility in the state of Alabama. The clothes then go onto the showroom floor. Electronics are wiped of all personal information before they’re sold. Jewelry is cleaned. Most other saleable items go right onto the shelves.

Any items that are not family-friendly (you can use your imagination)—these are removed and not put up for sale.

The “Unclaimed Baggage” store is one of the top tourist destinations in the state of Alabama: it attracts over a million people per year.

The U.S., though, is unusual in this respect. In most countries, airlines or airports host public auctions, where anyone can go and bid.

Bags abandoned in the U.K. or in Canada go to auction houses. In the U.K., some auction houses sell suitcases full. Others sort the items and sell the suitcases separately from the contents. At the auction in Canada, bidders buy pallets full of abandoned, unopened suitcases—shipping not included.

Sydney’s airport auctions individual items, so buyers at least know what they’re getting. The 2023 auction included the usual—laptops, cameras, sunglasses. But it also included a violin, an air fryer, and a 50th anniversary edition of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album on vinyl.

Iberia, Spain’s national airline, hosts an annual auction of lost, full suitcases. Once a year, in Chile, there’s an auction of full, abandoned suitcases—buyers bid on lots of about ten suitcases each. They’re all laid out in a large warehouse for bidders’ inspection.

In Germany, the airports host live auctions of lost luggage. They publish the dates on their websites and bidders are welcome to come and place a bid on suitcases. Many individuals go and buy single suitcases, full of unknown stuff.

Bidding on a full suitcase is a gamble. Some are full of dirty clothes. Some are full of clean clothes. A lot have a mixture of clothing and accessories—e-readers, neck pillows, watches, rings, glasses, things like that. Often, the most valuable item in a suitcase is…the suitcase itself . But sometimes travelers pack valuable or interesting items from their travels: souvenirs, liquor, and antiques are sometimes found in lost luggage.

Who buys this stuff? Most of the buyers are resellers. They have online businesses that resell items on eBay, or they have local resale stores. They take a gamble, paying a small amount for a lot of bags, and they hope to make up the cost. There was even a show on the Travel Channel called “Baggage Battles” about these auction house regulars.

Jeff’s take

“Baggage Battles” lasted five seasons from 2012 to 2017.

I don’t think I would want to buy a suitcase sight unseen. I mean, what if someone had come back from a beach vacation and hadn’t washed their clothes? Three months later, you open the suitcase up…no thank you.

You get a deep discount if you buy a full suitcase, I will say that. But I rather like the thrift-store approach: someone opens the suitcases, sorts out what can be sold, washes the clothes, and then you can shop like at a normal store. Less thrill, but at least more certainty. The store in Alabama says most items are between 20 and 80 percent off their new retail price.

{Break}

Track down

To track down is to find someone or something after a very thorough search.

When you use “track down,” you know what you’re looking for. It’s not usually close by. You might have to look in a lot of different places. It takes a lot of effort. You can track down a person or you can track down a thing.

Let’s start with a thing. If you travel on an airplane, and if the airline loses your checked bag , then the airline tries to find it. Often, it’s just coming on the next flight to your city. Often, it’s easy to find. It will be at your airport in a couple of hours. That’s the most common scenario.

But sometimes, something happens, and your bag winds up in another place. And there might have been a mistake, it might not have gotten scanned in, the tag with the barcode might have fallen off or gotten damaged, there might have been a weather delay somewhere. And so in these rare cases, the airline will track your bags down. They will search. They will make calls. They will look in a lot of places. They will go to a lot of effort to find your bag. And with any luck, they’ll be able to track it down. With any luck, they’ll find it after a thorough search.

It’s common to use “track down” with documents. If you travel for work, you might have to save your receipts and submit them to get reimbursed. I used to have to submit receipts to get reimbursed from my health insurance. You might need to save receipts to keep business records or get tax deductions.

If you’re really organized, you’ll have all your receipts in a folder somewhere. But if you’re like me, you have to track them down when you need them. Did I save those files to my desktop? Are they in my downloads folder? Did I take a picture with my phone? Are they still in my email? Did I delete them—and do I have to log into a website to get a new copy? Or, worse, do I have request a new copy from someone else?

Sometimes, I would have to call hotels and get them to email me receipts from my visit weeks or months prior. This is tracking down a document. I would search my emails, search my downloads folder, search my temporary files, and sometimes I’d have to ask someone to send me the file. This is a thorough search. I was tracking those documents down.

Police might investigate a crime, maybe something that happened with a car. They might see a video that shows a car with a license plate. Their job is to track down the vehicle. They have to do a thorough search for that car. They have the license plate number, so they can find the owner. Sometimes that’s not enough; the car’s owner might not be living at the registered address. Maybe the car was stolen. Maybe the car was registered to an elderly person and the person’s son or daughter uses it. This is effort: the police have to track down the vehicle. They have to find it and it requires a thorough search.

Close your eyes (not if you’re driving!) close your eyes and think about your circle of friends when you were, say, seven or eight years old. Now imagine you want to get in touch with one of those friends. Would it be easy? For some of you, it might be easy. But I suspect that some of you might have to track those friends down.

They might have changed their names, if they got married. They might have moved out of state. They might have common names. You might not be connected on social media. I’m thinking back. I’m not in close touch with many people from my hometown. If I wanted to find people I was friends with long ago, I’d have to track them down. I’d have to search. I’d have to ask people, friends of friends. It would not be easy.

See you next time!

That’s all for the audio lesson this Thursday. Hey, I’ve got some news for you. The months of July and August are usually slow in the northern hemisphere, with kids out of school and summer vacations. In parts of Europe, they take all of August off!

And I have some projects at Plain English that I want to do, so I’m going to do something interesting. It’s going to be called “Summer Break.” And so what I’m going to do is this. We’re still going to do new lessons for all of July and August. But we’re going to make them a little lighter, a little easier.

The topics are all going to be about culture in the U.S. The first two episodes of Summer Break are going to be about east coast living and west coast living. What are the differences, what are the pros and cons, of living on the east coast versus living on the west coast?

Those are going to start in two weeks, with the episode on July 1. And they’ll go until the end of August. They’ll all be a little different. This will be a little easier on me because I won’t have to do quite as much research on the topics and I can prepare them in advance.

Next week, we’ll have two normal episodes. And then our Summer Break episodes will start up on July 1. See you on Monday!

Have you ever wondered what happens to your bag when the airline loses it?

Lesson summary

Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics. And sometimes, instead of a current event, I just pick something that interests me. And that’s what we’re doing today.

I got to wondering. When an airline loses a suitcase, and despite its best efforts, it can’t match the suitcase with its owner, then what happens to the bag? What happens to all the stuff in it? And so today’s story here at Plain English is the answer to that question.

In the second half of the audio lesson, I’ll show you what it means to track something down (or track someone down).

This is lesson number 685, so that means JR, the producer, has uploaded the transcripts, exercises, and full lesson resources to PlainEnglish.com/685.

What happens to the world’s lost suitcases?

Last year, about nine billion passengers flew in a commercial airplane. Almost all of those passengers would have carried some kind of luggage—either carry-on bags or checked bags.

Over ninety-nine percent of those passengers walked out of their destination airport with their bags. But some of them—and this has happened to a lot of us, at some point—some of those passengers did not get their bags at their destination.

Airlines today are very good at delivering luggage. The airline industry says that 99.5 percent of checked bags do not get lost. That leaves only half a percent of bags that don’t make it to their destination as scheduled—and, around the world, that adds up . It’s about 25 million bags.

The vast majority of those get reunited with passengers within a couple of days, often within 24 hours. Airlines are good at tracking down lost bags: all bags have a tag and a barcode, and often, passengers can track their lost bags on their phones. In a minority of cases, airlines have to track down lost bags in far-flung cities.

Still, not every single one of those 25 million lost bags is reunited with its owner—worldwide, about eight out of every one thousand lost bags never makes it back to its rightful owner. These bags are just totally lost. So what happens next?

National regulations and international treaties say that airlines must compensate passengers for lost bags: that simply means, the airlines have to pay passengers. But that still doesn’t answer the question of what happens to the bags.

All those bags are somewhere in the system—usually unclaimed at an airport. Airlines store them in warehouses. They attempt to find the owner. They hold the bags for a while, in case the owner shows up to claim them. But after three months, the airlines give up on finding the rightful owners. This is where it gets interesting.

In most developed countries, the airlines are required to hold onto bags for three months. After that, they sell, auction, or donate lost bags. They don’t hold onto them forever.

There are two approaches to auctioning lost property: one is to sell the bags full of stuff, and the other is to open the bags and sell the property in categories.

In the United States, the airlines are responsible for disposing of lost bags. And the airlines have exclusive contracts with a single store to buy the lost luggage.

The store is called “Unclaimed Baggage” and it’s located in a small town in the state of Alabama. They have about a 5,000 square-meter showroom, which is like a department store full of abandoned property. There’s a section for clothes, a section for accessories, a section for electronics, watches, and much more.

Unclaimed Baggage buys suitcases, usually paying a flat fee per case or per kilogram. Company employees open the bags and sort the items. Everything inside falls into one of three categories: sell, donate, or recycle or throw away.

If it’s clothing, the company washes the items itself: it has the largest commercial laundry facility in the state of Alabama. The clothes then go onto the showroom floor. Electronics are wiped of all personal information before they’re sold. Jewelry is cleaned. Most other saleable items go right onto the shelves.

Any items that are not family-friendly (you can use your imagination)—these are removed and not put up for sale.

The “Unclaimed Baggage” store is one of the top tourist destinations in the state of Alabama: it attracts over a million people per year.

The U.S., though, is unusual in this respect. In most countries, airlines or airports host public auctions, where anyone can go and bid.

Bags abandoned in the U.K. or in Canada go to auction houses. In the U.K., some auction houses sell suitcases full. Others sort the items and sell the suitcases separately from the contents. At the auction in Canada, bidders buy pallets full of abandoned, unopened suitcases—shipping not included.

Sydney’s airport auctions individual items, so buyers at least know what they’re getting. The 2023 auction included the usual—laptops, cameras, sunglasses. But it also included a violin, an air fryer, and a 50th anniversary edition of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album on vinyl.

Iberia, Spain’s national airline, hosts an annual auction of lost, full suitcases. Once a year, in Chile, there’s an auction of full, abandoned suitcases—buyers bid on lots of about ten suitcases each. They’re all laid out in a large warehouse for bidders’ inspection.

In Germany, the airports host live auctions of lost luggage. They publish the dates on their websites and bidders are welcome to come and place a bid on suitcases. Many individuals go and buy single suitcases, full of unknown stuff.

Bidding on a full suitcase is a gamble. Some are full of dirty clothes. Some are full of clean clothes. A lot have a mixture of clothing and accessories—e-readers, neck pillows, watches, rings, glasses, things like that. Often, the most valuable item in a suitcase is…the suitcase itself . But sometimes travelers pack valuable or interesting items from their travels: souvenirs, liquor, and antiques are sometimes found in lost luggage.

Who buys this stuff? Most of the buyers are resellers. They have online businesses that resell items on eBay, or they have local resale stores. They take a gamble, paying a small amount for a lot of bags, and they hope to make up the cost. There was even a show on the Travel Channel called “Baggage Battles” about these auction house regulars.

Jeff’s take

“Baggage Battles” lasted five seasons from 2012 to 2017.

I don’t think I would want to buy a suitcase sight unseen. I mean, what if someone had come back from a beach vacation and hadn’t washed their clothes? Three months later, you open the suitcase up…no thank you.

You get a deep discount if you buy a full suitcase, I will say that. But I rather like the thrift-store approach: someone opens the suitcases, sorts out what can be sold, washes the clothes, and then you can shop like at a normal store. Less thrill, but at least more certainty. The store in Alabama says most items are between 20 and 80 percent off their new retail price.

{Break}

Track down

To track down is to find someone or something after a very thorough search.

When you use “track down,” you know what you’re looking for. It’s not usually close by. You might have to look in a lot of different places. It takes a lot of effort. You can track down a person or you can track down a thing.

Let’s start with a thing. If you travel on an airplane, and if the airline loses your checked bag , then the airline tries to find it. Often, it’s just coming on the next flight to your city. Often, it’s easy to find. It will be at your airport in a couple of hours. That’s the most common scenario.

But sometimes, something happens, and your bag winds up in another place. And there might have been a mistake, it might not have gotten scanned in, the tag with the barcode might have fallen off or gotten damaged, there might have been a weather delay somewhere. And so in these rare cases, the airline will track your bags down. They will search. They will make calls. They will look in a lot of places. They will go to a lot of effort to find your bag. And with any luck, they’ll be able to track it down. With any luck, they’ll find it after a thorough search.

It’s common to use “track down” with documents. If you travel for work, you might have to save your receipts and submit them to get reimbursed. I used to have to submit receipts to get reimbursed from my health insurance. You might need to save receipts to keep business records or get tax deductions.

If you’re really organized, you’ll have all your receipts in a folder somewhere. But if you’re like me, you have to track them down when you need them. Did I save those files to my desktop? Are they in my downloads folder? Did I take a picture with my phone? Are they still in my email? Did I delete them—and do I have to log into a website to get a new copy? Or, worse, do I have request a new copy from someone else?

Sometimes, I would have to call hotels and get them to email me receipts from my visit weeks or months prior. This is tracking down a document. I would search my emails, search my downloads folder, search my temporary files, and sometimes I’d have to ask someone to send me the file. This is a thorough search. I was tracking those documents down.

Police might investigate a crime, maybe something that happened with a car. They might see a video that shows a car with a license plate. Their job is to track down the vehicle. They have to do a thorough search for that car. They have the license plate number, so they can find the owner. Sometimes that’s not enough; the car’s owner might not be living at the registered address. Maybe the car was stolen. Maybe the car was registered to an elderly person and the person’s son or daughter uses it. This is effort: the police have to track down the vehicle. They have to find it and it requires a thorough search.

Close your eyes (not if you’re driving!) close your eyes and think about your circle of friends when you were, say, seven or eight years old. Now imagine you want to get in touch with one of those friends. Would it be easy? For some of you, it might be easy. But I suspect that some of you might have to track those friends down.

They might have changed their names, if they got married. They might have moved out of state. They might have common names. You might not be connected on social media. I’m thinking back. I’m not in close touch with many people from my hometown. If I wanted to find people I was friends with long ago, I’d have to track them down. I’d have to search. I’d have to ask people, friends of friends. It would not be easy.

See you next time!

That’s all for the audio lesson this Thursday. Hey, I’ve got some news for you. The months of July and August are usually slow in the northern hemisphere, with kids out of school and summer vacations. In parts of Europe, they take all of August off!

And I have some projects at Plain English that I want to do, so I’m going to do something interesting. It’s going to be called “Summer Break.” And so what I’m going to do is this. We’re still going to do new lessons for all of July and August. But we’re going to make them a little lighter, a little easier.

The topics are all going to be about culture in the U.S. The first two episodes of Summer Break are going to be about east coast living and west coast living. What are the differences, what are the pros and cons, of living on the east coast versus living on the west coast?

Those are going to start in two weeks, with the episode on July 1. And they’ll go until the end of August. They’ll all be a little different. This will be a little easier on me because I won’t have to do quite as much research on the topics and I can prepare them in advance.

Next week, we’ll have two normal episodes. And then our Summer Break episodes will start up on July 1. See you on Monday!

Have you ever wondered what happens to your bag when the airline loses it?

Lesson summary

Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics. And sometimes, instead of a current event, I just pick something that interests me. And that’s what we’re doing today.

I got to wondering. When an airline loses a suitcase, and despite its best efforts, it can’t match the suitcase with its owner, then what happens to the bag? What happens to all the stuff in it? And so today’s story here at Plain English is the answer to that question.

In the second half of the audio lesson, I’ll show you what it means to track something down (or track someone down).

This is lesson number 685, so that means JR, the producer, has uploaded the transcripts, exercises, and full lesson resources to PlainEnglish.com/685.

What happens to the world’s lost suitcases?

Last year, about nine billion passengers flew in a commercial airplane. Almost all of those passengers would have carried some kind of luggage—either carry-on bags or checked bags.

Over ninety-nine percent of those passengers walked out of their destination airport with their bags. But some of them—and this has happened to a lot of us, at some point—some of those passengers did not get their bags at their destination.

Airlines today are very good at delivering luggage. The airline industry says that 99.5 percent of checked bags do not get lost. That leaves only half a percent of bags that don’t make it to their destination as scheduled—and, around the world, that adds up . It’s about 25 million bags.

The vast majority of those get reunited with passengers within a couple of days, often within 24 hours. Airlines are good at tracking down lost bags: all bags have a tag and a barcode, and often, passengers can track their lost bags on their phones.