At airports, mismatched luggage is typical, but this Bengaluru man’s endeavour to locate his luggage is unusual. Nadan Kumar, a Bengaluru-based software developer, decided to utilise his abilities to track down his lost luggage by hacking into the airline’s website.

Nandan not only located his luggage, but he also described the situation and informed the airlines of the website issues.

Being unable to identify your luggage on an airport baggage belt or having your suitcase picked up by mistake is one of the most underrated worries.

To make matters worse, the airline is unlikely to assist you in retrieving your luggage. However, after experiencing a similar situation, a Bangalore resident channelled his inner hacker to solve the problem.

Hey @IndiGo6E,

Want to hear a story? And at the end of it I will tell you hole (technical vulnerability )in your system?

Soo I traveled from PAT – BLR from indigo 6E-185 yesterday. And my bag got exchanged with another passenger. Honest mistake from both our end. As the bags exactly same with some minor differences.

I realised it only after I reached home when my wife pointed out that the bag seems to be a different from ours as we don’t use key based locks in our bags. PS: We have too much faith in airline staff So right after reaching home I called your customer care. 

After multiple calls and navigating through @IndiGo6E IVR and of course a lot of wait I was able to connect to one of your customer care agents and they tried to connect me with the co-passenger. But all in vain.

So long story short I couldn’t get any resolution on the issue. And neither your customer care team was not ready to provide me the contact details of the person citing privacy and data protection .  @Ankurkrtweets take note of this, it gets interesting

After the call did not work, the agent assured me that they will call me back when they are able to reach the other person. (I am still waiting for that call )

So I slept the night without any resolution to the issue. Thinking I may get a call in morning. And after I did not get any calls from @IndiGo6E I decided to take the matter in my own hands.

Image : Nandan kumar bag and his Co-passengers bag

So, today morning I started digging into the indigo website trying the co passenger’s PNR which was written on the bag tag in hope to get the address or number by trying different methods like check-in, edit booking, update contact, But no luck whatsoever.

So now, after all the failed attempts, my dev instinct kicked in and I pressed the F12 button on my computer keyboard and opened the developer console on the @IndiGo6E website and started the whole checkin flow with network log record on.

And there in one of the network responses was the phone number and email I’d of my co-passenger. Ah this was my low-key hacker moment and the ray of hope. I made note of the details and decided to call the person and try to get the bags swapped.

And thankfully I was able to reach my co passenger with the phone number I got from the logs and luckily we lived in a close proximity of 6-7 KMs. So we decided to meet at a Center point and got our bags swapped. Dear@IndiGo6E , take note of my next tweet and try to improve.