The beauty of the luggage tag

The tickets to ride should be the most important physical, tangible evidence of excitement for a journey. That piece of card that states the departure and the location, the date and the seat number somehow becomes the precious centre-piece for the scrap-book, the focal point for the photo album, the pic on the Facebook page.

The ticket for this journey is paper, A4 and computer-generated. So the trip itinerary is then given elevated status, the 9 to 5, the evenings free, the meeting points and attraction places. But then the luggage tags arrive. Small, thin pieces of paper with your operator logo and space to write, to actually handwrite and not word process the home address, destination address and name. That simple fragile scrap to be used to forward delayed luggage and identify ownership from the carousel.

The trip is an educational study visit to New York - twenty #adprstudents two colleagues and I biting on the apple for a week from February 25. We'll see Strawberry Frog, 5WPR, JWT, DDB, Ogilvy and Saatchi and we will have a ball. The planning starts ten months prior (my 11th, students' first trip) and we check things off as we go on. Today the luggage tags appeared. It's a sign to say everything's sorted, the admin is up to date, you're going. They may not be much to look at or to hold or to write on. But their beauty lies in their place in the process. Two words. Cannot. Wait.