Here's how an AirTag saved a skiing trip after a baggage hiccup

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Find My Precision Finding Airtag Hero
Find My Precision Finding Airtag Hero (Image credit: Christine Romero-Chan / iMore)

What you need to know

  • Someone used the Find My app at an airport to locate a missing pair of skis.
  • An AirTag showed that the skis were not where they should have been.

Apple's AirTags are a great way of making sure that you don't lose things that are important to you but that doesn't always mean small things like your car keys or wallet. It can also mean something big, like a pair of skis. And that's what one person did with their skis when they went on a skiing trip — just before the airline lost them.

Ross Feinstein over at The Points Guy set off on a skiing trip and attached an AirTag to the skies just in case things went awry. Sure enough, that's exactly what happened. After landing in Madrid Feinstein found that their skis were nowhere to be seen. According to Find My, they were in the right airport, just not where they should be.

Around 9:30 a.m., I started to get nervous — I was the only one left waiting at the carousel and oversize bag area. Where were my skis? By this time, I had already opened the Find My app on my iPhone and saw my skis were actually located at my arrival gate. However, they hadn't moved since my flight had arrived nearly an hour earlier. I approached the baggage customer service office, where the agent repeated what I saw on the airline's mobile app: Both of my bags were at the baggage claim.

Except, they weren't.

I decided to show the agent my phone, which showed the actual location of my skis: planeside. She was first impressed that I had this level of detail about my bag's location (which was six minutes old per my iPhone), and she immediately started calling around to figure out why the bag was still planeside. It turned out that I had the only oversize bag on my flight, and the contractor who was supposed to bring up my bag was unaware that it was waiting for a transport from the plane to the oversize baggage belt in the baggage claim. A few minutes later, my ski bag finally appeared, and I made my connecting flight — with both bags in tow — without any further issues.

An AirTag saves the day again!

We've of course heard some worrying stories of AirTags being used for things they were never intended for, but this is another example of an instance that proves that they're arguably the best iPhone item trackers around.

Still not convinced that AirTags are for you? Check out our collection of the best AirTag alternatives instead!

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.