As passengers increasingly use AirTag to track their luggage while traveling, airlines, too, are embracing this piece of tech to help assist them in the event of a lost bag. Several airlines have started using Apple’s AirTag feature, and American Airlines has also joined the list.
American Airlines allows customers to share AirTag location
American Airlines
has become the latest carrier to let passengers share their AirTag location in the event of lost baggage. Travelers are increasingly relying on this technology to track their luggage while traveling by air commercially, and carriers have also recognized the need to adopt it.
American says that customers can generate a link through Apple’s Share Item feature, available on iOS 18.2 or later, and share it with the carrier in the rare case when a bag is misplaced for any trip with a segment from or to a US airport. Passengers are required to scan the QR code at the baggage office to start their claim and provide their information.
Photo: MKPhoto12 | Shutterstock
Apple introduced the option for customers to share the location of their lost items with third parties last year. Users were allowed to share a secure link with the location of an AirTag or Find My network accessory with others, and soon, airlines were included in the list of third parties. Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Services, commented,
“Find My is an essential tool for users around the world to keep track of and find their belongings. The Find My network and AirTag have proven to be a powerful combination for users while traveling, providing invaluable location information when bags have been misplaced or mishandled. With Share Item Location, we’re excited to give users a new way to easily share this information directly with third parties like airlines, all while protecting their privacy.”
Lost bags
While it’s easier than ever to travel around the world and access various locations globally through air travel, the entire process has also become a lot more complex. As airlines and airports expand operations, dealing with millions of bags every year also results in some getting lost occasionally.
It’s not uncommon for people to travel long distances by airplanes only to arrive at their destinations and find out that their bags have not arrived. As such, many have started to take matters into their own hands and started using tech like AirTag to track the location of their items.
Photo: Andrey_Popov | Shutterstock
While these instances are still rare when compared to the number of passengers who travel daily, when the figures are added up, they can seem quite significant. For example, a study of major airlines in the US found that these carriers lost or mishandled more than 684,000 pieces of luggage in the first quarter of 2022.
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According to American Airlines, it loses less than 1% of customers’ checked bags, and when a bag is mishandled, customers are usually reunited with their bag in just over a day. By using the AirTag option, American hopes that the process of finding bags will be even easier.
Several airlines are using AirTag
American Airlines joins a list of airlines already allowing passengers to share their AirTag information. United and Delta Air Lines
have already integrated this feature into their apps, and recently, the Lufthansa Group airlines also introduced this service. These include all the airlines in the group, such as Lufthansa
, SWISS, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines, and Eurowings.
Oliver Schmitt, Head of the Lufthansa Group Digital Hangar, commented,
“Thanks to our app and website, passengers can now find solutions quickly and easily in the event of irregularities. In particular, we have been able to achieve significant improvements in the last few months in the area of baggage tracing. The integration of our customers’ AirTag data opens up additional possibilities for us to act even more efficiently and quickly.”
Air Canada, Virgin Atlantic, Air New Zealand, Qantas, Singapore Airlines, British Airways, Aer Lingus, KLM, and Turkish Airlines are some other carriers that have adopted this new tracking system.