Woman Uses Apple AirTag to Watch Her Lost Luggage Bounce Around Town

When United Airlines told Valerie Szybala they'd deliver her delayed luggage, she believed them. The Apple AirTags in her suitcase, however, told a different story.

After landing last week at Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., Szybala learned that her bag—packed with vacation souvenirs—had not made the same flight. To make amends, United promised to drop off the bag directly.

Szybala, like many modern travelers, had equipped her case with a puck-shaped AirTag tracker, designed to help users locate misplaced or stolen items via the Find My iOS app. The tiny accessory uses ultra-wideband technology and a peer-to-peer network that taps into billions of Apple devices to find missing items.

So, when Szybala's tagged bag departed the D.C. airport on Dec. 29, she was able to follow its delivery journey just a few miles away. But the luggage didn't arrive that day; instead, it appeared to spend the night at a residential apartment complex.

"That's where the real chaos began," Szybala told Mashable, after her Twitter thread recounting the saga went viral.

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In a text chat, a United customer service rep told Szybala to "calm down" and not to worry.

"I don't know why is it showing it there," the representative (who could not be confirmed as human) wrote. "But your bag is safe at the Delivery services distribution centre." That was not accurate, according to Szybala's AirTags.

With no luck finding her own bag at the complex, Szybala watched as the bag traveled to McDonald's, the same block of apartments, and then to a suburban shopping mall, before eventually landing right back at the apartment building.

On Jan. 2—four days after first tweeting about the missing suitcase—Szybala finally received her luggage. "I'll give more details [and] lessons learned later," she wrote in an update. "For now [I] wanna say thank you for all of the support, and shout out to the building resident and local news crews who came out to help."

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United Airlines did not immediately respond to PCMag's request for comment, but told Mashable that it is "working with our baggage delivery vendor to understand the details of this situation."

"We've been in touch with this customer to discuss this situation and confirm she has received her luggage," the firm said in a follow-up. "The service our baggage delivery vendor provided does not meet our standards and we are investigating what happened to lead to this service failure."

The tiny trackers also made headlines last fall, when German airline Lufthansa U-turned on its threat to ban activated AirTags, powered by a CR2032 "button cell," from checked luggage. The battery, common among wristwatches and key fobs, contains 0.1 grams of lithium metal.

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