New AirTag feature

Stan, mine has those features now (I'm in the beta program so have an early release of iOS 18) and it's really nice. You can also show your contact info to someone else using the AirTag. For example, if someone finds it, you can add your phone number or email address that allows the finder to reach out.

That would be great IF the airline was willing to do their part. My brothers bag sat at the Dallas airport for 3 weeks then send to Madrid for a week then back to Dallas and finally Denver. His bag was on vacation for 38 days, yet he kept calling American and telling them exactly where it was. Not one person in 38 days did anything about it.

In October I was part of a 14 day package tour to Greece and turkey. Several in our group had airbags in their various bags. We had one woman who was consistently late to the bus. She had an uncanny ability to vanish into thin air, especially in places like down town instanbul

We were strategizing how we could stealthily get an airbag into her purse? Coat pocket? So we would at least know if she had just dashed into the rest room or was she now 2 miles off in the opposite direction.

I assumed this is not the new air rag feature of which you speak.

doric8, the new sharing feature would allow you (the owner of an AirTag linked to your phone) to share the location information (the Find My app) for your 'tag with another person (like the airline) so they could see in real time the same location information. In this case, the airlines are agreeing to set up programs and procedures to use this information to actually retrieve your bags.

You can always slip an AirTag into someone's luggage, purse, car, coat pocket etc. But because of an existing anti-stalking feature, if that person has an iPhone, they will get alerts after a while telling them that an AirTag is "traveling with you". It happened to me on a bus tour, when the Airtag in my pocket (on my car keys) kept triggering an alert to a person with an iPhone sitting in the next row. There's no way to temporarily turn off the AirTag, so that was kind of embarrassing.

This article mentions:

[snip]

As part of the rollout, Apple is partnering with over 15 airlines, including Delta, United, Virgin Atlantic, Lufthansa, Air Canada, and more. All of these airlines will be able to “privately and securely” accept links to lost items, as “access to each link will be limited to a small number of people, and recipients will be required to authenticate in order to view the link through either their Apple Account or partner email address.” This feature will be available to airlines in the “coming months.”