A holiday packing checklist with a tracker in every bag

Start by sorting your luggage into three piles

Before anything goes in a case, split what you are taking into three groups. It changes what you tag and where.

Pile one: cannot be replaced on the trip. Passports, prescription medication, a laptop with the only copy of something on it, car keys for the airport car park, a camera you earn a living with. Losing any of these ends or reshapes the holiday.

Pile two: replaceable but painful. Clothes for a fortnight, the pushchair, the golf clubs, the wetsuits, the kids' comfort toy. Replaceable in theory; a miserable afternoon in practice.

Pile three: everything else. Chargers, toiletries, books. If it goes, you shrug.

Pile one travels on your body or in your cabin bag and never leaves your sight. Pile two goes in the hold and is what tags are for. Pile three does not need thinking about at all.

The holiday packing checklist, bag by bag

Hold luggage

• One tag per checked bag, not one per traveller. If you are a couple sharing two cases, that is two tags.
• Put it inside, not on the outside. A tag dangling from a handle is a tag that gets snapped off by a belt, and an outside tag advertises that the bag is worth taking.
• The best position is flat in a side pocket or under the packing cubes near the top. Depth costs you Bluetooth range at the moment you most want it.
• Name it something a stranger would understand. "Blue Samsonite, Aberdeen" beats "Bag 2".
• Photograph the case before you check it. If you ever have to describe it, you will be glad.

Cabin bag

• Tag it too. Cabin bags get gate-checked at the last minute, left in overhead lockers two rows back, and put down beside chairs in departure lounges.
• This is also the bag that gets left on trains and coaches on the way to the airport, which is where a left-behind alert earns its keep.

Keys

• Airport car park keys, house keys, and the holiday rental's keys once you have them.
• The house keys are the ones people forget to tag, and the ones whose loss follows you home.

Pushchairs, sports kit and instruments

• Gate-checked pushchairs disappear into the same handling system as hold luggage and come back out of a different door.
• Golf bags, ski bags, bikes and instrument cases are handled separately from the main belt at many airports, which is exactly why they go astray more often.

The awkward ones

• Wallets and card holders: a coin-shaped tag will not slide into a card slot. It fits a note compartment or a zipped coin pocket, and nowhere else.
• Sunglasses and glasses cases: tag the case, not the frames.
• Anything you will genuinely never let go of does not need a tag at all. Be honest about which things those really are.

The five minutes before you leave

Do this at home, not at the airport, where the wifi is bad and your hands are full.

1. Add every tag to the Find My app on your iPhone under Items and give each one a name you would recognise on a bad day.
2. Ring each one once. It confirms pairing and tells you how loud it is going to be, which is information you want before you need it.
3. Turn on Notify When Left Behind for the bags, and add home and the office to your trusted locations, or you will be nagged every time you go out without your suitcase.
4. Share the important items with whoever you are travelling with. Item sharing on iOS 17 and later means both of you can ring the case and both of you can see it, which halves the number of times you have to ask.
5. Check the battery indicator in Find My. A tag you set up two summers ago may be due a coin cell.

What to expect at the other end

Set expectations now and you will save yourself a bad hour later.

Nothing is relayed from inside an aircraft hold, the map will show the last confirmed position before departure, then leap forward the moment your case is somewhere with people in it again. Gaps of several hours are ordinary. Read the timestamp alongside the pin, every time.

If a bag does not appear, file the report at the desk before you leave the airport, then attach a shared location link if your airline accepts one. Many now do, and we have covered which airlines take one.

How the Locata Tag suits a packing list

The practical detail is the thickness. At 9 mm and around ten grams, a Locata Tag lies flat in a suitcase pocket without displacing anything you actually wanted to bring, and it will not rattle around a golf bag. It is IP67 rated, so a soaking on a wet apron or a spilled bottle in a rucksack is not a problem, and the CR2032 runs for up to two years, which comfortably covers several trips between changes.

It is a Find My network accessory, so it lives in the same Items list as the rest of your Apple kit and needs no app or account of its own, iPhone or iPad on iOS 14.5 or later, and no Android version. Close in, Play Sound will bring 80–100 dB out of the speaker at ranges up to 60 m, which is how you pick your case out of a pile of forty identical black ones.

Boxes hold two tags and two key rings, which is a hold bag and a cabin bag, or one case each. Sort it before the next trip.