Will lost luggage soon be yesterday’s gripe?
Lost luggage may soon become as rare as lost airline tickets — or, at least, you’d think so when you talk to someone like Randal Collins.
Collins, a flight attendant based in Chicago, left his iPad on a recent flight. He had tagged it with a $25 device called Tile that emits a wireless signal up to 30 metres (100 feet). It also uses a network of other Tile users to help owners find missing objects.
The tablet proved to be elusive, first tracking at his arrival gate. By the time he showed up to claim it, the plane had been moved to a hangar. Collins reported the iPad missing, and a few weeks later, another Tile user picked up its trail in a terminal at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.
“After combing through the gates in the vicinity, I found it in the closet behind a gate, on the ledge above a door,” he remembers. “… Tile led me directly to it.”
Tile is just one of several new ways travellers are finding lost belongings. They include devices that use such technology as Bluetooth and GPS and leverage the power of crowdsourcing to find and retrieve your items. They’re worth considering for your next trip.
It’s hard to gauge the extent of the lost-baggage problem. Rail and bus companies don’t report statistics on lost luggage. Neither do hotels, which often store bags on behalf of their guests.
What’s known, though, is that lost items are a top annoyance on the verge of being eliminated, according to technology experts.
“In the near future, every object will be smart and trackable,” says futurist Gray Scott. “The idea of lost luggage will disappear from our lexicon.”
Among the gadgets designed to make that happen is KiiTAG, a luggage tracker similar to Tile. The $20 device has a 60-metre (200foot) range but, at six months, half the battery life of the Tile.
To extend your range farther, you can use something like the Vectu Max (available for pre-order at $100). It’s an emergency-response locator that can track your belongings — as well as people — around the world. The Max, which looks like a small cellphone, uses GPS and cellphone technology to track your property.
Trakdot ($50, plus $20 annual service fee) works the same way and is specifically marketed for air travellers. The Trakdot uses cellular technology to find your bag. It can send alerts to your smartphone whenever your luggage arrives.
Of course, it’s only a matter of time before all this technology becomes integrated with the luggage itself. That’s the idea behind two new carry-on bags available later this year. The Bluesmart (starting at $300), which begins shipping in August, will feature tracking technology, a digital lock and the ability to weigh your property and track your trip via a smartphone app. And the Trunkster ($300 and up), which will be available in September, does almost the same thing, with an innovative “zipperless” entry design.
On a smaller scale, the Royce Freedom Wallet ($99) offers the same wireless tracking ability as the tracking tags but folds directly into a leather wallet.
The renaissance of luggage-tracking presents an interesting problem for companies that lose your luggage, particularly airlines. What will happen when passengers know more about the whereabouts of their missing luggage than the airline? We can only imagine some of the resulting arguments.
If travellers embrace this technology, it’s not too hard to envision a world in which everything of value is tracked and connected. In that world, lost luggage would be completely preventable.