Where to put a tracker in your luggage: hold or hand

What is the difference between hold and hand luggage here?

Hold luggage is out of your control from bag drop to carousel; hand luggage is under your control until the moment an airline decides otherwise.

Hold luggage goes through screening, sortation and loading without you, and the airline's knowledge of it is a series of barcode scans that stop when the bag leaves a scanner. Hand luggage stays with you unless the overhead lockers fill, in which case it is tagged at the gate and loaded into the hold with thirty seconds' notice. A bag that can become hold luggage should be treated as hold luggage.

Where should the tracker go inside a checked bag?

In an interior pocket in the lid or lining, not at the bottom under packed clothes.

Soft fabric between a tag and the outside world costs you sound, not signal, but sound is what finds a bag in a storage room. Three placements that work, in order:

1. The zipped mesh pocket in the lid of a hard case.
2. A shoe, standing upright near the top layer, which keeps the tag off the case floor.
3. A toiletry bag near the edge of the case, if everything else is packed tight.

Avoid the outside pockets, which are the first thing opened, and never tape a tag to the shell, where a belt will remove it.

Which bag should you tag first?

The one whose contents you could not replace on the day.

For most travellers that ranking is: the checked case, then the laptop bag, then the specialist item camera kit, ski boots, instruments, medical equipment. A tag in the cabin bag that never leaves your shoulder is the least useful of the three, right up until the moment the gate takes it off you.

How does a tag behave once the bag is out of sight?

It stops being a radio you can reach and becomes a record of where other people's phones last saw it.

The tag never knows its own position. It broadcasts an encrypted identifier; nearby Apple devices report where they were when they heard it. In a terminal that means frequent updates, in a sealed container it means none until the doors open, and at three in the morning in a freight yard it means the last sighting is hours old and still correct.

What are the numbers to check a tracker against?

These are the specifications that decide whether a tag suits luggage rather than a key ring.

The two rows that matter for a suitcase are the water rating and the battery. Cases sit on wet aprons, and a tag you have to recharge is a tag that is flat on the outbound leg of the second trip.

Where does it go in a rucksack or a holdall?

In a compartment with its own zip, close to the top, and never clipped to an outside strap.

Soft bags have no lid pocket to use, so the working rule is different: find the smallest closed space in the bag and put the tag in it. A rucksack's lid pocket, the padded laptop sleeve, or a packing cube near the opening all keep the tag near the surface, which is where it is loudest and easiest to hear. The strap clip that comes with most tags is for keys, not for a bag that will be thrown onto a coach roof anything visible on the outside is something a handler can catch on a belt or a stranger can remove in ten seconds without touching your possessions.

What about tagging the contents rather than the bag?

Tag the bag, not the item, unless the item leaves the bag on its own.

A camera body that comes out at every stop is worth its own tag; a hairdryer is not. The exception is anything you hand to someone else, a laptop through security, a coat into a cloakroom, where the item and the bag separate by design.

How Locata Tag suits both bags

The reason a Locata Tag comes two to a box is the shape of this problem: one bag you check and one bag you carry, and no sensible way to choose between them. Each tag is a Find My compatible tracker that appears under Items in Apple's own app on an iPhone or iPad, with location reports encrypted end to end so nobody else, including us, can read them.

The honest limits are in the table. No Ultra Wideband means no arrow guiding you the last few metres, just a pin, a timestamp and a sound. Nothing here works with Android. And the network's refresh rate is somebody else's phone walking past, which is generous in an airport and thin in a warehouse.

Two tags, free UK delivery, and about a minute to put them where this article suggests.