Travelers Confront Baggage Chaos with AirTags and Luggage Trackers

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.”