Buy It For Life: Bags: An Independent Owner's Guide to the Briggs & Riley, Osprey, JanSport, and Filson Guarantees

Your bag is the only thing you own that gets destroyed by a stranger operating industrial machinery in a building you are not allowed to enter.You hand it over at a counter. It goes onto belts, through sorting machines, down chutes, into a hold, and back out through all of it in reverse. Then it comes up the carousel on its side, which is how you know before you get to it.One company in this book covers that in writing. Another one names it as an exclusion, in the same sentence as animal damage.Mitch Pryor spent twenty-two years as a property and casualty claims adjuster. He has a banker's box in his garage with every claim he has filed since 1998, including the two that came back denied.Inside: - The decision you are standing in front of at the carousel, and which road closes behind you when you walk out of the terminal- Why three of these four guarantees say lifetime and the word means four different things- The company whose own warranty page states plainly that lifetime of the product does not mean your lifetime- Why bags almost never fail at the fabric, and the five dollar part that saves most of them- The exclusion that puts airline mishandling next to animal damage- The repair that arrives in a padded envelope and takes twenty minutes at your kitchen table, which almost nobody asks for- What cosmetic covers, which is every visible thing that has ever happened to your suitcase- How a lifetime guarantee was switched off by a parent company in a single announcement, and the one clause in the rescue deal that brought it backPlus the Claim File. Nine worksheets, including the Carousel Card: a one-page checklist built to be read standing up, in a terminal, on a phone, at eleven at night. Photograph that page before your next trip.No affiliations. No sponsorships. No opinions about which fabric has the best hand.Match the document to the failure. This is the volume where getting it wrong costs the most.