Best luggage trackers

Network is the spec that decides whether a tracker works. Everything else decides how pleasant it is to live with.

A Bluetooth tracker has no GPS and no cellular radio. It cannot tell you where it is. All it does is broadcast a short, rotating, encrypted identifier a few hundred feet, and wait for someone else's phone to hear it, note its own GPS position, and upload that pairing anonymously. You are not tracking your bag. You are reading the last place a stranger's phone noticed your bag.

That single fact reorders every spec on the box. Bluetooth range determines how close a relay phone has to pass, which matters at the margins. Battery life determines how long the tag keeps broadcasting. But the number of participating phones determines whether anything happens at all -- and in a baggage hall, a cargo facility or a hotel back room, it is the only number that counts.

Apple's network is the largest because every modern iPhone participates by default. Google's Find Hub works the same way across Android, and reached meaningful scale more recently. Samsung's network is Galaxy devices only, a subset of Android. Tile's network is people who installed the Tile app, which is a much smaller pool than any of the three.

So the buying rule is unusually simple: buy the tag that joins the biggest network your own phone can set up and read. An iPhone household buys an AirTag or a Find My tag. An Android household buys a Find Hub tag. Only a genuinely mixed household has a reason to consider Tile, and it is paying for that convenience with network size.

This is the part that changed, and it is the strongest single reason to put a tag in a checked bag. Until recently, telling an airline your tracker showed the bag at a specific facility was an anecdote a baggage agent had no process for. Now some of them do.

Apple added a feature called Share Item Location to Find My in iOS 18.2. It generates a link for a lost AirTag or Find My accessory that shows the item's location on a map to whoever you send it to. Apple announced that more than 15 airlines would accept these links as part of their mishandled-baggage process, naming Aer Lingus, Air Canada, Air New Zealand, Austrian Airlines, British Airways, Brussels Airlines, Delta, Eurowings, Iberia, KLM, Lufthansa, Qantas, Singapore Airlines, Swiss, Turkish Airlines, United, Virgin Atlantic and Vueling, with more to be added over time.

The links are time-limited: Apple's implementation expires them after seven days, and sharing stops automatically once you and the bag are reunited. That is worth knowing in advance, because it means the right moment to generate the link is when you file the claim, not three days later.

No equivalent airline-side process exists for the Android, Samsung or Tile networks as of this writing. You can still show a baggage agent the map on your phone, and plenty of agents will act on it -- but it is a conversation, not a form field. If your travel is mostly on the airlines in that list and you own an iPhone, this is a genuine functional advantage for the AirTag over everything else here.

Yes, and the confusion is worth clearing up because it still circulates. In October 2022 Lufthansa was widely reported to have banned AirTags from checked luggage, citing dangerous-goods rules on transmitting devices. The reporting was wrong about the rule, and Lufthansa reversed its position shortly afterward.

The actual regulatory position: the FAA permits luggage tracking devices containing lithium metal cells of 0.3 grams of lithium or less in checked baggage. An AirTag's CR2032 cell contains roughly 0.1 grams, well inside that limit, and CR2032-class coin cells are accepted in baggage by the FAA, EASA and IATA. The TSA has stated that tracking devices are allowed in both carry-on and checked bags.

Two caveats worth keeping. First, that limit is about the cell, not the brand -- a tracker with a larger lithium battery is a different question, so check the battery if you are using something other than a coin-cell or small rechargeable tag. Second, airline-specific policies can always be stricter than the regulator's floor, and a carrier is entitled to set its own rules, so a quick check on your airline's dangerous-goods page costs nothing before a long trip.

Deep in the bag, not in an outside pocket. An external pocket is the first place a thief looks and the easiest place for a tag to fall out during handling. The middle of the main compartment, tucked into a packing cube or an interior zip pocket, gives the signal a worse path out and a much better chance of staying with the bag.

Attach it to something rather than leaving it loose. A loose disc migrates into a shoe and stays there. A tag on a keyring clipped to an internal loop, or slipped into the sleeve of a packing cube, is a tag you can find on arrival and reuse on the way home.

Check the battery before you fly, every time. This is the single most common tracker failure and it is entirely preventable: coin-cell tags report their battery state in the app, and a rechargeable one needs a few hours on USB-C. The second most common failure is a tag you took out of the bag after the last trip and left in a drawer. Our carry-on essentials list is the right place to add a pre-flight tag check.

We have not flown these five tags through the same airports and compared how often each reported a location. That is the test that would actually rank them, and it needs repeated itineraries on multiple carriers with controlled bag handling -- we have none of that. So there are no hit-rate percentages, no relay counts and no star ratings from us on this page.

Specifications here -- networks, battery types and claimed life, water ratings, ranges, loudness and dimensions -- come from the manufacturers' own product pages and published documentation, and where a figure is the manufacturer's claim we have said so. The airline and regulatory statements come from Apple's published description of Share Item Location and from FAA, TSA and IATA guidance on lithium coin cells in baggage; both are linked in the sources below.

The claim we are most confident in is the one that needs no testing: network size dominates everything else, and it is a matter of how many phones participate by default rather than a matter of product quality. We publish no prices -- trackers are discounted constantly and sold in multipacks that change the math. Every buy link opens a live Amazon search for the model named. Full method at how we pick.