United Airlines and Apple AirTags are ready to help reunite you with your lost bags
- United is one of the first to support Apple’s Share Item Location feature
- If your bag with an AirTag goes missing, Find My can help
- You’ll share that secure URL with United to help get your bag back sooner
If you’re anything like me, you dread the thought of losing your bag while traveling. Hence, Apple’s announcement of teaming up with airlines like United to share an AirTag’s location securely was nothing short of incredible. And folks, now your faith is being rewarded… at least by one airline.
United has now integrated Apple’s ‘Share Item Location’ for AirTags and other Find My devices into its system. If your luggage goes missing, you can now share your item locations with United to help make that reunion happy even sooner. And hopefully, with a lot less stress.
Courtesy of the iOS 18.2 update, which also brought with it Genmoji and a new feature to Voice Memos that’s loved by Michael Bublé, the Items tab within the Find My app has a new sub-menu.
Under Lost, which is only used if you misplace or can’t find an AirTag or another Find My network device, you now have the option to ‘Share Item Location’, which will generate a URL to share.
So let’s say you’re flying on United from EWR (Newark Liberty International Airport) to SFO (San Francisco International Airport), and you check a bag with an AirTag inside – which is something you should always do – but you arrive in sunny California, but your bag ended up someplace else.
Once you alert United, courtesy of a new screen within the app, you can take that URL generated through ‘Share Item Location’ in Find Me and paste it in. This way, United’s customer service and operations agent can use the AirTags location to help find your bag even faster – that’s pretty fantastic.
Further, considering that the shared URL shows the AirTag’s location on a map, a timestamp, a radius with the correct accuracy, its coordinates, and updates as it moves within the Find My network, it can be a huge help for an airline like United in helping get the bag back home.
Easing your privacy worries
I’ve previously lost a bag, and while I could send screenshots of my Find My app showing my AirTag’s location to United, it wasn’t real-time or easily accessible for the representatives I was speaking with – Apple has effectively solved that with this new tool. United’s doing the integration the right way here.
Speaking to TechRadar, Lori Augustine, Vice President of United Airlines San Francisco Hub, said, “Our strong partnership with Apple on this game-changing technology empowers every interaction we have to give our customers an experience like never before. United Airlines is driven by the same commitment as the world’s leading tech companies to offer customers world class products that shape the future.”
Clearly, United recognized that many folks are already traveling with AirTags and see this integration as a win-win for better customer experience and potentially making its operations run even more effectively. Apple’s Find My network is accurate and comprises hundreds of millions of Apple devices like iPhones and iPads, some of which are operated by United on aircraft and at airports. United has 120,000 iPhones, iPads, and Macs, which helps boost the Find My network at these locations.
Of course, as with the AirTags themselves and the Find My network, privacy is critically important here. So, to access the ‘Share Item Location’, a user will have to authenticate, and United and Apple worked together to allow easy access with a whitelisted email address. Further, only a finite number of views or logins are allowed on the ‘Share Item Location’; this way, the tool doesn’t get abused.
Better yet, the ‘Share Item Location’ link will automatically expire after seven days and will be terminated thanks to proximity alerts when you’re reunited with the bag. United says that less than 1% of its customers’ bags arrive on a later flight, and if you have an AirTag inside – or another Find My device – this can help to make that less-than-pleasant experience a bit easier.
It’s live now in the United app, and the “Share Item Location” is live as long as you’re updated to iOS 18.2 on your iPhone – no update is required for the AirTag itself to use this feature. Further, this is the latest tech improvement from United, and we hope that more are on the way. The airline already supports Live Activities on the iPhone and the Apple Watch, as well as a handy shortcut for dropping off bags at an airport. Anything to avoid a line, right?
And United’s rollout of accepting Apple’s ‘Share Item Location’ couldn’t have come sooner, as the busy holiday season is nearly here.
Other airlines will hopefully follow suit soon, as Apple originally teased Aer Lingus, Air Canada, Air New Zealand, Austrian Airlines, British Airways, Brussels Airlines, Delta Airlines, Eurowings, Iberia, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Lufthansa, Qantas, Singapore Airlines, Swiss International Air Lines, Turkish Airlines, Virgin Atlantic, and Vueling in its original announcement.
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