I could only find one previous mention of AirTags on HUBB (which I've copied in below on a separate post) and thought the subject might be worth a revisit. The text I've included below was prepared for another site and was primarily about luggage tracking, but I've stuck AirTags on my vehicles as well.
_______________
Arriving on holiday and finding your luggage didn't make it is a stressful situation. It's not the airlines fault, they don't actually touch your luggage, it's the fault of the baggage handling companies the airline contract with. But it
IS the airline's responsibility to track down your luggage and reunite you with it. Some airlines are good at this, some are absolutely useless.
What initiated this thread for me was reading the Morocco World News report this morning where Morocco’s Minister of Transport, Mohamed Abdeljalil, acknowledged the persistence of services challenges at the Mohammed V airport,
especially the loss of luggage.
The AirTags communicate using long range Bluetooth 5.0 to link with your smartphone and you can locate your tag if it's within say 20 metres, but clearly that won't help if you are in Marrakech and your bags are in Casablanca. This is where the clever stuff comes in.
Any iPhone that has 'Find My' activated is actively searching for signals from devices and it doesn't matter whether they are your devices, or someone else's, the device locations get passed to Apple servers. So if someone in baggage handling with an iPhone passes close to your bags, the location will be available to you through 'Find My' and will be displayed on a map that you can screen grab and send to the airline.
NO EXCUSES NOW !! AirTags cost £35 for 1 or £119 for 4 from Apple. You can also buy from Amazon at £29 and £99.
_______________
So the problem with the example above is that whilst iPhones are commonplace in Europe, most Moroccans use less expensive Android devices. Nevertheless, if your baggage had been sitting on a luggage carousel in the arrival airport there will have been enough iPhone users around to record its last seen location which at least narrows down the airport it's at.
Air Tags are locatable from Android devices by using a Bluetooth scanner, but only in the immediate vicinity.
If you own a Samsung Galaxy phone running Android, you could purchase the Samsung SmartTag which is roughly comparable, however it only supports Galaxy phones rather than all Android phones, see
comparison of devices.
The above link also mentions Tile as a tracker, and I use these to track my keys and wallet.
I've recently bought a four-pack of AirTags and now have one hidden in my campervan, one concealed on my KTM 790, another located in an innovative position on my electric Brompton folding bike, and the fourth on the collar of Rosie, my adorable Cockapoo. I've disassembled the first three AirTags mentioned and removed the speakers so that they doesn't alert thieves if I am tracking them.
I also use Vodafone Smart Curve Tracker as SIM driven tracker for my vehicle. This works under battery power or can be plugged in to USB supply. When my son-in-law borrowed the campervan to drive to Italy I was able to watch the journey real time as the Curve is plugged into a hidden USB port and sends constant signals. This isn't a universal solution, however, as the Curve Tracker
only works in 100 or so countries.
So I would be really interested if anyone knows of a device that can track anywhere in the world and has a lengthy battery runtime.