A woman received a special act of kindness from an airport worker after her luggage was lost while transferring flights.
Hana Sofia Lopes, a Luxembourg-born Portuguese actor, was traveling from the European country to Montreal, Canada – with a brief stay in New York City – when she lost all her bags, days before she was beginning production on a movie.
When she landed in New York City, Lopes was left only with the clothes she was wearing during her flight from Luxembourg.
“Here I am in New York, with no clothes other than those I was wearing during the flight. No shoes. No brush for my hair. No makeup. No socks. Nothing. Just me and my handbag,” she recently told CNN Travel.
The actor was set to attend an entertainment industry event in Montreal, but the outfit she planned on wearing was lost with the rest of her luggage en route from Europe to the United States. Before boarding her flight to Canada, she bought a last-minute dress for the event in New York, but was still without her makeup bag. After landing in Montreal, she inquired about her lost luggage at the airline information desk.
While Lopes was frustrated with the luggage mix-up, she knew it was not the fault of the airline workers and tried to remain calm. But she soon found herself getting emotional as she spoke about her lost luggage.
Azalia Claudine Becerril Angulo, a part-time airport worker at the Montreal airport, suddenly sympathised with Lopes when she recounted the details.
“She was really sad, angry also, and I understood why,” Angulo recalled to CNN Travel. “I wanted to help her. Normally, people are rude and they’re very aggressive. She was different.”
Angulo helped Lopes by looking up the luggage reference number, and found that her bags were somewhere in Frankfurt, Germany. The actor told the airline worker that she was in Canada to shoot a movie, in addition to the industry event, and had no makeup to put on her face.
When Angulo heard this, she revealed to Lopes that she’s a makeup artist and would be happy to do her makeup for the event.
“If you want, I can come to your hotel in the afternoon and do your hair and makeup so that you can attend your reception,” Angulo said. “If I was in your place, I would be also freaking out. So I really want to do it for free.”
When Angulo arrived at Lopes’ hotel room the next day, the two women struck up a conversation about their lives and careers. The actor recalled to CNN Travel how it felt “very natural” speaking to Angulo, like she was “meeting up with an old friend,” despite meeting at the airport just one day before.
Angulo also insisted on doing her makeup for free, much to Lopes’ dismay. “Makeup for me, it’s an art, it’s really a passion,” she explained. “So it’s not about the money. It’s just because I really like to make the person feel good and happy.”
That same day, Lopes learned her luggage had been tracked down and was making its way to her Montreal hotel. “She’s not only a great human, she’s also really good at her job because she managed to find my luggage,” Lopes said about Anuglo.
Since then, the two women have kept in touch and plan to meet up for dinner and drinks the next time Lopes is in Montreal, all thanks to some lost luggage.
Earlier this year, another airline passenger received an act of kindness from a stranger at an airport when her family’s flight from Seattle to Vancouver was canceled. Instead of waiting hours for the next flight, and missing their cruise set to take off at noon, a woman at the airport offered to drive them the 140-mile trip.
“We were kind of in disbelief that someone would be generous enough to do this for us, but we felt like she was our best option to make it to the cruise ship on time,” TikTok user Chelsea Smith recalled to The Independent. “I’ve definitely been fortunate to have small random acts of kindness done for me over the years, I’ve never had anything even remotely close to this amazing happen to me.”
She continued: “So, a random stranger takes me and my husband and my three-year-old son from Seattle to Vancouver, crosses the border, drops us off at the cruise ship with plenty of time left. I still cannot believe that this happened to us. We lucked out that the nicest person ever was behind us in line.”
The Independent has reached out to Hana Sofia Lopes for comment.
