You say goodbye to your precious suitcase at the curb or the check-in desk, fully prepared to get it back in a completely different form. Sometimes it’s mangled. Sometimes it’s taped together. Occasionally it arrives at the apex of that final hill of the luggage belt, and you barely even recognize it but for the ladybug identification tag you’ve been clinging to since college.

Don’t you ever wonder just what happens behind the scenes? Now you can know. Just watch the video above.

From light to dark, high tech to low, the journey our luggage takes from the moment we check it until the moment that we pick it up at our destination city (or at our front door from a courier tasked with bringing it to us once it has finally arrived where it was meant to), is quite intriguing. While what we can assume a GoPro is attached to Thrillist‘s enterprising video star, there is no indication of the tagging system that must be in place for the robots involved in the process to know where to place each and every piece of luggage.

Would you want to take a ride on the innards of an airport? I think I might, considering how gently those suitcases seem to move through the system. (No really, where do all the scuffs and bumps and bruises on our luggage come from when this is the system that they use?!) I probably wouldn’t have the guts to take that ride, but it’s kind of cool to think about, right? Tell me if you’d take a ride in the comments below!

—

HT: Thrillist