Apple is making it easier for passengers to track down lost luggage with a new facility that lets you share your AirTag location with airlines.
The new feature creates a shareable link that you can send to airlines or anyone else who might be hunting for your luggage. For a temporary period, they will be able to see the location of your AirTag, which many people use to track luggage, cars or other valuables.
Here’s how you can share your AirTag’s location if you ever become separated from your luggage.
Which Airlines Can You Share Your AirTag Location With?
To begin with, Apple has announced that three airlines will let you share your AirTag location with them: United Airlines, Delta and Air Canada.
However, in a post on X, Apple’s senior vice president of marketing, Greg Joswiak, said that there would be “more airlines coming soon.”
Note that Apple’s sharing service doesn’t (yet) provide a direct link to report missing luggage to the airlines. Instead, you’ll have to create a sharing link (instructions on this below) and contact your airline’s lost luggage team.
A post from Delta on X suggests that you will be able to do this via the Fly Delta app.
How To Share Your AirTag Location
You can share your AirTag location using any Apple device that’s signed in to the same Apple account as the AirTag, be that an iPhone, iPad or Mac.
Here’s how to do it:
- Open the Find My app.
- Select Items.
- Click on the relevant AirTag (on a Mac, click the little i in a circle icon that appears next to the AirTag’s label on the map).
- Under Lost AirTag select Share Item Location (Be careful not to click on the similarly worded option to Share AirTag—that’s an entirely separate function that lets others borrow your AirTag tracker).
- Follow the onscreen instructions and you should finally be presented with a link that you can copy and send to the airline or anyone else.
For what Apple describes as a “limited time”, the companies or people you share that link with will be able to see the location of the AirTag on a map from any web browser, hopefully helping them track down the precise location of the missing item.
Even if you can share the location, there’s no guarantee that the AirTag itself is capable of reporting its current position. The AirTag system basically relies on other Apple devices being in the vicinity of the AirTag, so that it can report its location. In a busy location such as an airport, that shouldn’t be a problem, but in more remote locations with few passing iPhone owners it may prove less reliable.
Still, the ability to share an AirTag’s location with others is a vast improvement on the current system, where users often resorted to sending screenshots to show where a lost item was located. However, such screenshots are immediately outdated from the moment they’re sent, whereas the live tracking provided by Apple would allow airline representatives to see the current location of the missing item, provided it could send a signal.
It’s also encouraging to see Apple still adding new features to the AirTag, which hasn’t had much love from the company since it was first released in 2021. The version of the hardware on sale now is still the same as the device that was launched three years ago, and there were fears that Apple had effectively discontinued the device following repeated reports about it being used to invade people’s privacy. My colleague Tom Brewster revealed last year how the DEA had used the AirTag as a surveillance device.
The new option to share your AirTag location at least proves Apple hasn’t given up on the tracker.
