Gear

Why I Keep an AirTag in a Bag I Never Check

People laugh when I tell them this. I travel carry-on only. The bag is never out of my sight on a plane. So why does it have a tracker in it?

Because of buses.

Where my bag actually goes

On a long trip, my bag spends a lot of time away from me. Under a night bus in Vietnam. On the roof of a minivan in Cambodia. In the luggage room of a guesthouse while I wait for check-in. Behind the counter of a café while I walk around a town for the afternoon.

None of those places are dangerous. But all of them involve someone else holding my stuff. And the AirTag turns “I hope it’s still there” into “I can see it’s still there.”

It cost $29. It weighs 11 grams. The battery is a coin cell that lasts about a year.

The time it earned its place

In Thailand, I took an overnight bus from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. My bag went under the bus at the start. Somewhere around 3 a.m., we stopped, and half the bags came out and went onto a different bus heading somewhere else.

Mine was one of them.

I didn’t notice until I checked Find My at the next rest stop. The dot was 40 kilometers behind us and going the wrong way. I showed the screen to the driver. He made a phone call. My bag was waiting for me at the Chiang Mai station six hours later, on the next bus.

Without the dot, I’d have arrived with no bag and no idea where it went. With it, I had a screen to point at, and pointing works in every language.

Where it didn’t help

AirTags don’t have GPS. They work by pinging any iPhone that happens to walk past. That’s brilliant in cities, where iPhones are everywhere. In rural areas, it’s patchy.

When my bag sat on a minivan roof crossing into Laos, the location didn’t update for two hours. Fewer iPhones out there. It caught up when we reached a town. But for those two hours, I knew exactly as much as everyone else on the van.

So think of it as reassurance. It tells you where your bag was the last time a phone walked by.

The alert that scared a stranger

This one’s worth knowing. AirTags have anti-stalking protection. If an AirTag that isn’t yours travels with you for a while, your iPhone warns you.

On a ferry in Indonesia, the woman sitting next to me got that alert. Her phone said an unknown AirTag was moving with her. It was mine, in my bag, at our feet. She was understandably worried until I showed her my Find My app and played the sound so she could hear where it was.

If you carry one, expect this now and then. Especially on long transport where you sit near the same people for hours. A quick explanation fixes it.

How I carry it

• Sewn into the lining, not clipped outside. A tag on a keyring is the first thing a thief removes. Mine sits inside a small pocket I closed with a few stitches.
• One tag, not four. I tried one in my tech pouch too. It was overkill. The pouch never leaves the bag.
• Battery change once a year. I put a reminder in my calendar on the date I last changed it. A CR2032 battery costs a couple of dollars at any pharmacy.

If you’re on Android, Apple’s AirTag won’t work for you. Samsung’s SmartTag and Tile do the same job, though they rely on their own, smaller networks of phones.

Would I replace it

Same week. It’s the cheapest thing in my bag and the one that saved me the most stress. And I’d still never check the bag.