Luggage Tracking with Trakdot
My wife and I took a trip to Hawaii in 2016. This was a special trip. We were taking my father who always wanted to go, but just never could. It was also the first trip my wife and I were traveling with our own SCUBA gear. Tracking our luggage became a necessity once we started traveling with expensive gear.
I looked at several types of trackers and smart GPS devices. I settled on the Trakdot Luggage Tracker. When I chose this one I really didn’t know what I wanted out of such a device. I know I wanted it to tell me where my luggage was. I wanted it to use GPS to locate rather than my Bluetooth and cost was a concern. Trakdot seemed to fit my needs.
It doesn’t use GPS exactly. Instead it uses cell phone technology to track your luggage. To help know when your bag has been loaded onto your plane or help you find it in the baggage claim area it has Bluetooth. One great thing about this device is it takes normal AA batteries to power it. That is important with today’s flying restrictions on lithium batteries. The device even shuts off once the plane takes off, saving the batteries’ life.
The tracker uses a simple app on your smartphone. The app is free to download, but there is annual service fee of around $24.99 per year. The service fee prepays for the cellular network it uses during tracking.
Pros
- Small size, easy to fit in a full suitcase
- Uses standard AA batteries instead of lithium
- Multiple emails can be sent out when the your luggage arrives to an airport. I set it up to send to my wife and I.
- The auto shut off once the airplane takes off made the batteries last. I do recommend pulling the batteries out once you reach your hotel. I was able to take a 9 day trip (round trip flights) and use the same batteries.
- App was easy to set up
Cons
- Tracking is based on airports, so you only know it reached an airport and can not track outside of an airport.
- Bluetooth didn’t work for me. If you close the app it will not auto locate the device even when standing next to it. I would have to reconnect. This meant if I wanted to know if the luggage with the device made it to the airplane I would have to leave the app running. It never reconnected for me.
Have you used the Trakdot? Let us know what you think of it in the leave your thoughts section below.
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Travel and Technology writer