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My bag didn't make the connection, but the cruise ship was about to leave. My wife's bag came out on the third rotation. I waited through another full cycle. Then another. Finally, I went to the desk. The agent pulled up my bag tag and told me it had last been scanned in Charlotte and hadn't made the connection. It was likely on the next available flight, which landed at 4:20pm. Our ship left at 4:00pm. I remember what it felt like to hear that. This was our anniversary trip. Eight months of planning. My wife's face when I walked back from that counter is not something I want to remember. For the next two hours I only had a reference number and my own thoughts. I didn't know if the bag had moved. I didn't even know if anyone was actually looking or if the trace number I'd been given was sitting in a queue somewhere unattended. I kept calling and getting the same update. Ongoing. We had to make a decision. Do we risk it and hope that the bag arrives in time? We decided to board without it. I spent the first two days of our anniversary trip filing claims on my phone. New clothes from the ship's overpriced boutique. No dress she'd packed for the formal dinner. The bag eventually arrived at our third port of call, handed off by a courier to the dock while we were still at sea. But I think about those first days a lot. About what it felt like to have no information. To be standing at a desk asking strangers to help you find something that had disappeared into a system you had no access to. A few months later I was in an airport with my brother-in-law, who travels more than anyone I know. We'd just landed and he had his phone out before we even reached baggage claim. On his screen, I saw that he was tracking a dot on a map in Apple's Find My app. Curious, I asked him what he was up to. He explained that his bag stores a tracker that runs on Apple Find My, just like an AirTag. That means every iPhone in the building was quietly updating its location through Apple's ecosystem. If I'd had one of those in Charlotte, I would have known the moment the bag didn't make the transfer. I would have been on the phone before we landed. I would have had something to show the agent so that they could have tracked down my bag faster. That's when I realized that there are two kinds of people standing at that desk when the bag doesn't come out. The ones with nothing to show anyone, waiting on a system that may or may not be moving. And the ones who already know where the bag is before they've finished their sentence. For a long time I was the first kind. I found a way to become the second, and I'm never going back. 👉 https://www.spotminders.com/pages/10-reasons-ditching-airtags-list1