TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) – A Tampa teacher turned into a Christmas angel after helping holiday travelers reunite with their lost-luggage amid flight cancellations.
With thousands of flights canceled over Christmas weekend, science teacher Brittany Loubier-Vervisch took matters into her own hands to help travelers get their bags back at Tampa International Airport.
Business Insider reported that Loubier-Vervisch and her husband faced the same struggles after they canceled their Christmas Eve flight to visit family in Ohio due to severe winter weather battering the Midwest.
Instead, the couple decided to make a last-minute flight to Tucson and connect through Denver on Dec. 26.
“We had no idea that Southwest was going to cancel thousands of flights,” Loubier-Vervisch told Insider. After realizing they weren’t going to make it to Tucson on Monday, the couple canceled that flight too.
While her husband stayed at the Southwest Airlines’ customer service line trying to figure out how to get their luggage back, Loubier-Vervisch decided to head to the baggage claim to look for their bags herself.
When she got to the baggage claim, she told Insider she’d “never seen anything like it.” She stated that “hundreds, if not thousands” of bags piled up at the baggage claim from flights across the country.
With an intimidating sight in front of her, Loubier-Vervisch’s quick thinking led her to realize she could probably reunite some travelers with their bags by texting the number listed on the luggage tag.
“I was circling through the baggage claims as stuff was coming off the line and being piled up and if there was a tag on it with a number, I sent a text,” Loubier-Vervisch said.
According to Insider, she said she sent at least 50 text messages on Monday while sifting through to find her luggage.
It was reported that a lot of the bags at TPA were either sent there from another location where the traveler didn’t make it on the flight or they were left behind by those who made it out of Tampa without their bags.
As for the rest of the luggage, Loubier-Vervisch added that they were left behind due to the massive amounts of cancellations.
Loubier-Vervisch told Insider “just trying to help people so they knew where their bags were because people were all over the United States.”
Some of the travelers even mistook her for an airport employee.
“I was like walking through the bags, I was like, ‘Oh, here’s your bags. Is this your name?’ And they were like, ‘Yes,'” Loubier-Vervisch said. “I’m like, ‘Oh, here’s your other bags.’ And they were like, ‘Do you work here?'”
The teacher said people in the airport had been waiting on their bags “for hours,” adding that they were thankful for her help.
“It was an inconvenience for us,” Loubier-Vervisch told Insider. “But for people that had no idea where in the United States their luggage could possibly be, I was like, ‘Well if I at least tell them it’s in Tampa, they know it’s not still where they were, where they were going or you know, they can figure out where it is and at least know where to look for it.'”
Her good deed didn’t go unnoticed with one thankful traveler sharing the text she received from Loubier-Vervisch on Twitter.
She wrote: “Thank you to the random stranger who texted me that my suitcase was in fact in Tampa. You are a life saver! Especially since there was no way Southwest could ever tell me.”
Insider stated that Loubier-Vervisch and her husband were finally united with their bags around 4:30 p.m. about four hours after canceling their flight. But that time wasn’t lost as she told the outlet that it was “time well spent.”
“I’m a teacher, I help people, that’s what I do,” Loubier-Vervisch said. “Anybody can do something. What I did was very small, but if everybody does something, it can have a ripple effect.”
