Luggage tracker question

[No Bananas]

Going on Oasis Mediterranean cruise. Has anyone used a luggage tracker? Was just told by neighbor to look into one.

[fishywood]

If your luggage is misdirected and does not reach the ship on time, will having a tracking device on it make you feel better about wearing the same clothes every day?

 

Didn't think so. Save your money.

[cheeseclan]

If you fly on United they offer baggage tracking for free.  We love it since it tells you when your bag was checked in, loaded onto plane and then onto what baggage carousel.  

Of course it won’t help at the pier.

[mom says]

We had a missing bag when we arrived after a very long couple of flights in Abu Dhabi. Of course it was full of the clothes we had packed separately for our pre cruise stay.  When we went to the airline's baggage desk, the attendant found it after 10 seconds on the computer. The bag was still sitting in Toronto. It took them a day and a half to get it to us. Fortunately we had that time before we needed to embark the ship. A tracker would have been no additional help. And if we had had to leave before it finally got to Abu Dhabi, it still wouldn't have caught up to us any faster.

 

I can see them possibly being useful for frequent fliers on airlines that don't have their own tracking systems (don't most of them nowadays?). Also useful if someone else takes your bag off the luggage carousel and leaves with it. But  you'd most likely want a GPS tracker for these purposes, and those come with a subscription or monthly fee- an additional expense  that is hard to justify for the occasional traveller. YMMV.

[FlyerTalker]

And as these prior posts highlight, just what kind of "tracker" are you talking about?

[No Bananas]

He had a luglock, after using tile. I wasn't familiar with either product. It seems like an expense that I don't travel enough to use. Hopefully a several day early arrival will allow any bag mix up to sort out. Thank you for the quick replies.

[FlyerTalker]

One reason I asked is that there are "trackers" that are merely an identification and "recovery" system.  For example, every Tumi bag has a bar code, which is linked to your contact info.  So even if all the tags and handles are ripped off the bag, you can still be identified through the bar code.  There are other products that do the same thing with stickers and/or tags, again coded to your info.

 

If you want to move into the realm of electronics, you can have passive RFID systems which will alert you if your bag gets beyond a certain radius from your "device".  This may be useful to let you know that the bag has been filched from your side while you stand somewhere.  Or which will make a sound if you "ping" them.  Some use a Bluetooth mesh to try to track where the item is.  (And that depends on many other users in the area to do the "tracking").  There are also other "trackers" that use active GPS and cellular service to advise you where your item is.

 

So, the whole area of "tracker" can be quite complex - and highly dependent upon what YOUR use would be.

Edited April 23, 2019 by FlyerTalker