Find My luggage tracking cut permanently lost bags by 90%

What SITA published

On 18 December 2025, SITA marked one year of its integration with Apple's Share Item Location feature with a news release from Geneva. Two headline figures came out of it. Where a bag carried an AirTag or a Find My network accessory and the traveller shared its location through the airline's tracing system, SITA recorded a 90 per cent reduction in luggage that was never recovered at all. Separately, carriers using the integration saw a 26 per cent reduction in the time taken to return a delayed bag.

"Baggage is shifting from a logistical problem to a digital service," Nicole Hogg, SITA's Portfolio Director for Baggage, said in the company's 2026 baggage report.

The same December release put adoption at 29 airlines using the Find My integration within WorldTracer, a system SITA says is deployed at more than 2,800 airports and used by over 500 airlines and ground handlers. Coverage counted a different way is higher: MacRumors listed 36 carriers supporting Share Item Location in January 2026, and 9to5Mac reported on 20 January 2026 that Apple had begun citing SITA's figures itself. The two counts measure different things, one is airlines wired into WorldTracer's workflow, the other is airlines that will accept a shared link by any route, which is why published totals differ by a dozen.

The figures in one table

Why a shared location changes the outcome

Baggage tracing is a matching problem. An airline holds two lists: bags without passengers, and passengers without bags. Historically the only bridge between them was a description typed at a desk black four-wheel case, silver zip pulls, red ribbon, and a barcode that stopped reporting the moment the bag left a scanner's field of view.

A shared tag location replaces that description with a coordinate. The agent is no longer searching for a bag that might be anywhere in the system; they are told it is at a named airport, in a specific building, and often which. SITA's own framing is that the passenger becomes a data source in a process that previously treated them as a claimant.

That also explains the shape of the improvement. The recovery-time gain is modest at 26 per cent, because a delayed bag was usually going to arrive anyway, the tag just shortens the search. The permanent-loss figure is enormous at 90 per cent, because permanent loss is overwhelmingly a failure of identification rather than a failure of transport. Bags are rarely destroyed. They are separated from their name.

What it does not tell you

Three caveats belong alongside those numbers. The first is selection: travellers who put a tag in a suitcase and know how to share its location are not a random sample of passengers, and SITA's release does not claim a controlled comparison.

The second is that the figures describe bags already inside the tracing system. A tag does nothing to stop a bag being misrouted in the first place; the 39 per cent of mishandling that SITA attributes to transfers in its June 2026 report is unaffected by what is inside the case.

The third is that sharing is a deliberate act. The location is not broadcast to the airline automatically, the traveller generates a link in the Find My app, hands it over, and it stops working once the item is back or the link expires. A tag sitting quietly in a suitcase with nobody sharing anything contributes nothing to these statistics.

How Locata Tag fits the finding

The SITA figures apply to AirTags and to Find My network accessories alike, and a Locata Tag is the latter: an MFi certified accessory that sits under Items in Apple's own Find My app on any iPhone or iPad from iOS 14.5 onwards. The Share Item Location flow is Apple's, not ours, so the link a desk agent receives from a Locata Tag is the same link they would receive from anyone else's Find My tag.

The honest limits go with it. Location reports come from passing Apple devices rather than from satellites, so a bag in a baggage hall full of phones updates often and a bag in a remote freight shed may not. There is no Ultra Wideband, so nothing walks you the last three metres. Boxes hold two tags, which is one for the case and one for whatever you would hate to leave in a hotel room.

If you fly with hold luggage more than once a year, a box of two is under £15 and the maths in the table above is the argument.

Sources

• SITA, 18 December 2025. One year later, SITA shows how integration of Apple's Find My Share Item Location can strengthen baggage operations
• 9to5Mac, 20 January 2026. AirTags are helping airlines dramatically cut down on lost luggage
• MacRumors, 12 January 2026. These 36 airlines offer the iPhone feature that helps find your lost bags
• SITA, 30 June 2026. Baggage IT Insights 2026