Airlines have either lost my checked bag or just stolen from it too many times for me to trust them with my possessions again. Maybe if I was transporting horse manure, or unpackaged glitter.
Every single statistic I’ve seen shows that lost luggage happens around 1% of the time. We fly fairly frequently - on average more than once per month and it’s really not something we think about.
My personal experience is I've had my luggage lost twice in the last 10 years at an average of 6 flights per year, so my personal incidence rate seems to be 2%
It also means that if you fly every week of the year it will likely only happen to you once all year. For the average traveler, it will be more like once in their entire lifetime.
There is absolutely nothing in my checked bag that would be any more than a minor annoyance if it were lost.
My wife and I literally had everything we owned in 4 suitcases for a year and carryon back packs for our electronics.
We got rid of everything we owned that wouldn’t fit in four suitcases in 2022 and hopped around different cities for a year on planes. Even then, if one of our suitcases had been lost, we would have used the airline reimbursement and just gone shopping.
You ever try to mail something to or from a developing or semi developed country? You'll be lucky if you ever see it again, let alone have to deal with import controls.
Is this true? Granted I usually just deal with using a standard toothbrush when I go on vacation but I have absolutely put my electric shaver and electric toothbrush in my checked bag without issue.
I thought there is now a battery size allowance that allows these to go under the plane.
You can put the toothbrush in your laptop bag. Although I don't know why you're buying toothbrushes with lithium batteries in them. Even if electric toothbrushes made sense that's still a waste of money compared to the disposable ones.
And no, it's not just a laptop bag. The list of things with batteries in our daily life is huge, and telling people to skip it just so that you can get on a plane a bit faster isn't reasonable.
This is really a safety issue. And tbf, you don't need more. I've traveled internationally with just a laptop bag.