AirTag vs Tile for luggage

Neither of these devices knows where it is. There is no GPS chip and no cellular radio inside either one - at the price and the battery life they publish, there could not be. What they do is broadcast a rotating identifier over Bluetooth Low Energy every few seconds, and wait.

When a participating phone hears that broadcast it uploads its own location alongside the identifier. You open an app and see the last place somebody else's phone overheard your bag. That is why network size dominates every other specification: a tracker with a perfect radio and nobody listening reports nothing at all.

Yes. Both of these run on a coin cell, and coin cells are not the rechargeable lithium-ion cells that airline rules restrict. The restriction people half-remember applies to power banks and spare lithium-ion batteries, which have to travel in the cabin - that is covered in power bank rules for flights.

A handful of carriers have at various points argued that a transmitting device in a hold bag should be switched off. In practice coin-cell trackers travel in millions of checked bags and the industry has settled around allowing them. Check your own carrier's dangerous-goods page if you want certainty before you fly.

1. Deep inside, not in an outside pocket. An external pocket is the first place an opportunist looks and the easiest place for a tag to be shaken out of.
2. Away from the metal frame and the handle tubes where you can. Metal detunes a small Bluetooth antenna and shortens the range the network can hear.
3. In a holder or a zipped pouch rather than loose. A loose disc migrates into a shoe, and then you cannot hear it ring.
4. One per bag, named for the bag. Guessing which bag a ping belongs to defeats the point.
5. Check the cell before a long trip. A year is a long time for a battery to go unnoticed.

If you are putting a tracker in a checked bag, the other half of the job is making that bag identifiable to a human - a real name and phone number on a durable tag. See best luggage tags for the ones that survive a baggage belt.

AirTag, by a wide margin, and for one reason: iPhone ownership is high enough in most countries that the network does not thin out when you leave home. Tile's density depends on local app adoption, which varies enormously between countries and is weakest in exactly the places you would most like to know where your bag is.

That is why `best luggage tracker for international travel` is a separate search from `best luggage tracker` - the answer changes. Best luggage trackers for international travel works through the full shortlist, and best luggage trackers covers the domestic case.

Buy on your phone, not on the tracker. iPhone means AirTag; Android means Tile Mate, or a Chipolo ONE Point if you would rather sit on Google's network than on an app community. If you are still deciding whether to bother at all, are luggage trackers worth it makes the case and the counter-case.

What none of them change is the arithmetic of checking a bag in the first place. If the trip can be done from the cabin, the bag cannot be mishandled - carry-on vs checked luggage is the decision that actually removes the risk.