You’ll Soon Be Able to Share Your AirTag’s Location With Your Airline
AirTags are very good . They allow you to keep track of things that tend to go missing, such as keys and wallets, as well as other items that are susceptible to theft, such as bags and bicycles.
Of course, sometimes a bag goes missing not because of theft. One popular use for these tiny trackers is to track missing luggage : People throw an AirTag in a bag and hand it to the airline. If that bag doesn’t make it onto the baggage carousel at your destination, a quick glance at the Find My app can give you some idea of where that bag is. If the airline is trying to say, “We don’t know where your bag is,” you can hold up your iPhone and say, “I know.”
Lost luggage is a more common problem than it should be. But on the bright side, airlines seem to want to do something about it.
Share an object’s location in iOS 18.2
This is all due to the new Find My feature introduced in iOS 18.2 , Share Item Location. The new feature allows you to temporarily share a link to the location of your Find My accessory with a trusted third party. For a limited time (the default is one week), they will be able to see your item, such as an AirTag, as if it were their own Find My device and can help you find it.
While this feature allows you to share your AirTag’s location with anyone, part of the offer is the ability to share these locations with airlines: if your luggage goes missing, you can directly share your AirTag’s coordinates with your airline – no more frustration. .
Currently, only one airline supports this feature: United Airlines . The airline announced the support on Thursday, December 12, a day after Apple released iOS 18.2 to the general public. United says you’ll be able to share a link to your Find My device’s location directly with the delayed baggage reporting tool in the airline app. Upon return, United says it will disable the location link, but you can disable it yourself at any time.
Apple says other airlines will support the feature in the “coming months,” including Aer Lingus, Air Canada, Air New Zealand, Austrian Airlines, British Airways, Brussels Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Eurowings, Iberia, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines , Lufthansa, Qantas. , Singapore Airlines, Swiss International Air Lines, Turkish Airlines, Virgin Atlantic and Vueling.
How to use the location of a Share item
First, make sure your iPhone is running iOS 18.2 or later. Then open Finder, tap the Item tab, and select the item you want to share. Scroll down and select Share Item Location . Click Continue in the pop-up window, then either copy the link provided or select Share Link to share it directly with your contact.
Remember that even if an airline has a link to your AirTag, this is not a guarantee that they will know its exact location at any time. AirTags are not real-time trackers. They do not have the ability to constantly transmit their location to the Internet on their own. Instead, they rely on other internet-connected Find My devices (often iPhones) to anonymously and securely share their location with the Find My network on their behalf. Because they rely on other nearby devices to update their location, they are great for general location tracking, but not for constantly updated GPS coordinates. For example, don’t use them to track your children .