Apple Airtag Helps Woman Find Luggage Lost for Days

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If you travel frequently, you may be familiar with the anxiousness of not seeing your luggage when you step off the airport. This fear is once again becoming a reality for many as air travel resumes its upward trend after the coronavirus pandemic lasted for two years.

Valerie Szybala, a traveler on a United Airlines aircraft to Washington, DC, in December 2022, came across this reality when her bag was delayed due to a connecting flight. The bag would arrive the following day, according to the United Airlines app, and the company volunteered to send it to her house. The bag did make it to DC the following day. Szybala had, however, inserted a tiny tracking gadget—an Apple AirTag—into it. She observed the luggage go about the DC region for several days, stopping at locations like McDonald's and a shopping center but always returning to an apartment building, even as United kept telling her the bag was in their service center. When she returned to the apartment, she discovered other empty United bags in the trash but was unable to locate her own. Szybala tweeted about the movements of her luggage, and those tweets quickly went viral. 

When she returned to the apartment for the fourth time, this time with a TV crew, she got a message from someone claiming to be a courier who claimed to have her suitcase. She was greeted by the courier, who did not have a uniform or an official car and was given back her bag, which was still locked and contained everything. CNN questioned United about Szybala's story, and they replied that the delivery service was subpar and that it was investigating it. The New York Times ranked Apple AirTags the best luggage monitoring device in December 2022, which is maybe appropriate.