How an AirTag Saved the Day in a Lost Luggage Fiasco

People use AirTags in many different ways — and not all of them good — but when used for their stated purpose of locating lost items, Apple’s tracking tags can be extremely helpful, as a Canadian air traveler recently found out.

According to The Daily Hive, journalist and TV host Winston Sih was scheduled to fly from Chicago to Toronto last week. However, when his original flight was canceled, he was forced to divert to Washington, DC, via United Airlines and then fly to Toronto from there.

In a scenario that’s far too common, Sih arrived in Toronto, but his bags didn’t. This led to a “wild goose chase” that demonstrated how indispensable an AirTag can be in cutting through airline bureaucracy when it comes to lost luggage.

Sih contacted United Airlines shortly after his middle-of-the-night arrival in Toronto and was told the bags would be delivered to his home. While he normally wouldn’t have had much choice but to take this at face value, Sih had packed an AirTag into his missing bags, so he knew exactly where the bag was — and quickly discovered that the airline wasn’t exactly being truthful or helpful.

Instead, he noticed that his bag hadn’t moved at all — it remained at the Washington Dulles airport overnight, 346 miles away from where Sih had landed. So, he contacted United Airlines again to request that his bag be flown to Toronto’s Pearson Airport, only to be told by the agent that it was “already in Toronto.”

Thanks to the AirTag, Sih was able to inform the agent that they were mistaken, as the bag had still not left the Washington airport. United finally put it on an Air Canada flight to Toronto, but as Sih told the Hive, “that’s where it started to go wrong as there were multiple airplanes involved.”

Rather than Sih having his missing luggage delivered to his home, it ended up on the baggage carousel at Pearson Airport, where it spun around for a while before someone — presumably a staff member — took it off. Unfortunately, whoever removed it from the carousel set it aside in the baggage hall, where it sat unattended for about 24 hours while the airlines were “looking for it.”

In an ironic twist, when Sih contacted both United and Air Canada once again to follow up on the delivery of his bag, this time he was told that it hadn’t left Washington — even though his iPhone clearly showed the AirTag’s location live in Toronto. Once he told them this, they promised someone would pick up his bag and get it to him as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, that promise turned out to be an empty one as Sih watched his bag sitting unmoving at Pearson for another day. Despairing of ever again seeing his luggage as anything more than a blip in the Find My app, Sih finally decided to take matters into his own hands and drove to Pearson Airport.

After bouncing back and forth between staff from the two airlines, Sih finally found a helpful Air Canada staff member who was able to have him escorted into the secure baggage hall — a cavernous room where he said locating his bag would have been “like finding a needle in a haystack, but way easier with technology.” Sih was able to use his iPhone 14 to locate his AirTag — and the bag to which it was attached — “sitting solo in the middle of the room.”

With the airlines clearly having no clue as to the whereabouts of Sih’s luggage and agents seemingly not caring, it’s unsettling to think about what would have become of the missing bag had it not been for AirTag. Sih believes he would have “waited days for them to actually go and look for it” had he not been able to tell them where it was. “AirTags are a must if you’re traveling,” he added.