Why you should always check where your bag is being tagged at check-in

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Sometimes we just need a celebrity mishap to remind us how easy it is to avoid a situation that likely impacts thousands of travelers everyday: luggage getting checked to the wrong destination.

Today, that lesson comes courtesy of CBS This Morning host Gayle King, who just flew from Los Angeles (LAX) to Los Cabos, Mexico (SJD) as her checked bag went to New York-JFK.

King was traveling less than 1,000 miles on Alaska Airlines flight 487, from LAX to SJD, while her bag flew 2,500 miles to New York. It'll likely need to return to the West Coast before making its way down to King in Baja California.

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I rarely deal with checked bags myself — often traveling the world with only my Tumi backpack — but on the rare occasions that I do travel with large luggage, I closely examine both the claim tags and the bag tags themselves. And you always should, too.

And, whenever you do check bags, make sure you're using the right credit cards, making it easy to avoid fees of $60 per bag on a round-trip flight — or sometimes even more. In King's case, that would have been the Alaska Airlines Visa Signature® credit card, but there are a number of options for other major carriers, including American, Delta, United, too.