Travelers Confront Baggage Chaos with AirTags and Luggage Trackers

Summer travelers hope tracking devices in suitcases will combat the proliferating chaos at airports. But first...

Today’s must-reads:

• Twitter’s revenue fell 1%, the first annual decline since mid-pandemic

• Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX is in talks to buy South Korea’s Bithumb

• Former White House press secretary Jay Carney is leaving Amazon to head global policy at Airbnb

You AirTagged your suitcase. Now what? 

For his cousin’s wedding earlier this month in Glasgow, Finbarr Taylor packed the custom-made MacIntyre of Glenorchy tartan kilt that his family gave him for his 21st birthday. Unfortunately, while he made to it the nuptials, the suitcase carrying his extravagant formal wear never did. It remained in the Toronto airport for a few days, then was transported to Edinburgh before being routed back to Toronto and then to a FedEx facility in Memphis. A few weeks later, it reappeared in San Francisco, zooming around the Bay Area for several hours before showing up outside his front door in San Carlos, California—while he was still abroad.

Taylor was able to follow the route of the suitcase and its sentimental cargo because he had slipped an Apple AirTag inside. The $30 device and similar products like Tile Mate fit inside a bag or onto a pair of keys and let their owners track their precise location on their smartphone. So while Taylor, the chief executive officer of Shogun Labs Inc., a company that lets people build websites without writing code, was presumably on vacation, he was also obsessively following his wayward suitcase and even tweeting about it: “Where will it go next? Good luck out there, little bag.”

The summer travel season has not been kind to travelers like Taylor who are forced to check luggage. Airlines are losing more bags than ever: In May, 238,000 suitcases were mishandled in the US alone, an 80% increase over the previous year, according to the monthly Air Travel Consumer Report from the US Department of Transportation. The bedlam appears worse in Europe, where technical snafus and staffing shortages are bedeviling airports in , leading to some social media posts and startling photos of piled-up bags at airports.

This is where AirTags come in. They’re so-called “Bluetooth Low Energy” devices, which send encrypted signals to any nearby iPhones, iPads and Macs. That allows users to see their item on a map in the “Find My” app on their iPhone or other devices. If it is in the vicinity of an iPhone 11 or newer, they can generate arrows on their screen that point to the direction of a misplaced item. The app can also ping the AirTag to make a sound—admittedly not helpful when it’s tucked inside a suitcase at a busy airport.

Proponents of the technology say that tracking checked luggage with AirTags and their ilk is a good way to relieve travel stress. “Trackers are especially useful for discovering if someone mistakenly took your bag off the carousel instead of their own,” wrote the Times. Henry Harteveldt, an online and travel industry analyst at Atmosphere Research, said he would use an AirTag if he had no choice other than to check a suitcase. “The end result is knowledge, and knowledge can increase peace of mind,” he says, adding: “2022 is not a year where you want to take chances with your checked bags no matter where you are traveling.”Daniel D. Velez, a spokesperson for the Transportation Security Administration, says the agency has “no policies or issues” with passengers using AirTags.

Personally though, I’m skeptical about any technology that increases anxiety around air travel but gives people few concrete ways to relieve it. Knowing that your bag is still in the terminal while the airplane taxis down the runway, for example, is a profoundly useless piece of information. Similarly, awareness that your luggage is at a holding facility in Greece won’t force the airline to ship it to you faster.

More broadly, AirTags put the responsibility of keeping track of checked bags back on the customer; yet another obligation, along with online check-in 24 hours before a flight, that comes with the modern hellscape that is air travel.

Ideally, all the airlines will start tagging bags themselves and then serve up location information through their smartphone apps. A few, like Delta, have been doing it for a few years; others are just beginning to roll out that technology, and it could prevent flights from taking off while a sizable complement of passengers’ bags have yet to be loaded onto the plane.

Personal tracking technology also has the added drawback of being fallible—triggering unnecessary panic when it runs out of battery.

For Finbarr Taylor though, there’s no question that AirTagging his suitcase was the right call. It allowed him to leave the Edinburgh airport instead of waiting in an hours-long lost luggage line, because he knew the bag was exactly thirty-three thousand miles away. It also influenced him to go buy a suit for the wedding when a timely reunion with his kilt became logistically impossible. “I probably would have found it a lot more annoying given what was in the bag if I didn’t know where it was,” he told me. “The fact that I knew where it was at all times and knew it wasn’t stolen made it an amusing side story.” 

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