Which luggage tracker to buy, and why it depends on your phone
Once you decide to put a tracker in your checked bag, the real question is which one. The honest answer starts somewhere most reviews skip: the phone already in your pocket.
A luggage tracker doesn't call home over cellular. It sends out a quiet Bluetooth signal, and any nearby phone that belongs to the right network hears it and reports the location back to you. So the tag is only as good as the crowd of phones around it. At an airport that crowd is enormous, which is exactly why these things work so well for travel. But the network your tag talks to has to match the phones doing the listening.
Your phone decides more than the brand
There are two big networks. Apple's Find My runs on the roughly billion iPhones out there. Google's Find My Device network runs on Android. A tag built for one can't hitch a ride on the other. If you carry an iPhone, you want a tag on Apple's network. If you carry an Android, you want Google's. Buy the tag that matches your phone and you get the biggest possible cloud of listeners working for you.
That single fact settles most of the decision before you ever compare features.
The short list
Apple's AirTag is the default for iPhone owners. The current version runs $29 for one or $99 for a pack of four, with no subscription ever. It has a feature called Precision Finding that walks you the last few feet with an arrow on screen once you're close, which is genuinely useful in a crowded baggage hall. The catch is simple: it only speaks Apple, so it's the wrong buy for an Android household.
The Chipolo POP is the one I point most people to when a home has a mix of phones. It's about $29 and works with both Apple Find My and Google Find My Device, so you pick the network when you set it up. The battery is a standard CR2032 you can swap yourself, and it lasts around a year. It doesn't do the arrow-guided close-range trick, but for a bag you're tracking across a continent, that barely matters.
Pebblebee is the pick a lot of Android travelers land on. It runs about $34, rides Google's network, and comes in a few shapes including a flat card that slides into a bag pocket. It recharges over USB instead of taking a coin battery, so there's nothing to buy again, though you do have to remember to top it up before a trip.
Tile still exists, but it leans on its own smaller app network rather than the Apple or Google clouds, so it hears far fewer phones. For travel specifically, I'd skip it.
The airport feature almost nobody sets up
Here's the part that changed things for me. When a bag goes missing, knowing where it is only helps if you can prove it to the airline. Apple added exactly that. On an iPhone running iOS 18.2 or later, you open Find My, pick the tag in your missing bag, and tap Share Item Location. It creates a temporary link you can hand to the baggage desk, and more than fifteen airlines now accept it directly, including Delta, United, American, British Airways, Lufthansa, and Qantas. Instead of "I think it's still in Rome," the agent sees a live map.
Android's side is catching up but isn't there in the same way yet. The Find My Device network will still pin your bag's last location, so the move for now is to screenshot that map and show it at the counter. It carries less weight than a link the airline's own system recognizes, but it's a lot better than a shrug.
What I'd actually do
Put one tag deep inside each checked bag, under the clothes rather than clipped to the outside where it can be pulled off. Match the network to your phone, and if your household runs both iPhone and Android, let the Chipolo POP settle the argument. Don't expect a moving GPS dot the whole flight. The tag goes quiet between pings and lights up whenever a phone passes near, which at a gate or a carousel is constantly.
Thirty dollars, once, no fees. Set against a bag that vanishes for a week, it's one of the few travel purchases that pays for itself the first time you actually need it. And most trips, you'll glance at it once, see your bag sitting on the plane, and stop thinking about it. That quiet is the whole point.