You've Probably Using Your AirTag Wrong When You Travel — Here's the Fix
If you've flown anywhere in the last couple of years, you've almost certainly seen it: someone at baggage claim quietly checking their phone, watching a little dot confirm their suitcase actually made the flight with them. AirTags have quietly become one of those travel accessories that went from "neat gadget" to "why would I ever fly without one" in record time. But here's the thing — dropping an AirTag in your bag and calling it a day is only doing about half the job. There's a right way to do this, and a few very avoidable mistakes that trip people up.
The battery trap nobody warns you about
Here's one that genuinely surprised us: not every CR2032 battery actually works in an AirTag, even though it's the exact size and voltage the device calls for.
The culprit is something you'd never think to check — a bitter-tasting coating some manufacturers, Duracell among them, add to the outside of the battery. It's there for a good reason, to stop small kids from wanting to swallow a loose battery they find lying around. But that coating happens to be non-conductive, which means it can sit right there in your AirTag doing absolutely nothing except blocking the connection it needs to power on. Apple has actually acknowledged this directly, warning that some bitterant-coated CR2032 batteries simply won't work.
So if you've ever popped in a brand-new battery and your AirTag stayed stubbornly dead, this might be exactly why. Worth checking before you assume the unit itself is broken.
Pack a spare before you need one, not after
An AirTag battery is rated for roughly a year, and Apple's Find My app will nag you once it's running low. The smart move — and the one most people skip — is tossing a fresh CR2032 straight into your luggage before you leave, so it's just sitting there waiting if the low-battery alert pops up mid-trip. It's a two-second fix at home versus a scavenger hunt through an unfamiliar pharmacy in a country where you don't speak the language.
Where you put it actually matters more than you'd think
This is probably the biggest "wait, really?" of the bunch. A lot of people clip an AirTag holder to the outside of their checked bag, treating it almost like a luggage tag. It looks purposeful. It's also kind of a bad idea.
The outside of your suitcase is exactly where it can get caught, snagged, and yanked clean off by a baggage conveyor system that was never designed with your AirTag in mind. The safer play is tucking it somewhere inside — an interior pocket, zipped into your toiletry bag, wherever it's not going to catch on anything mechanical along the way. Less visible, more secure, and it's still going to do its job just fine from in there.
Set up Lost Mode now, not during an actual crisis
This is the kind of thing that takes thirty seconds to set up and feels irrelevant right up until the moment it isn't. Lost Mode lets any NFC-enabled phone — including Android phones, not just iPhones — tap your AirTag and immediately see how to reach you. If your bag genuinely goes missing, that's the difference between a stranger who finds it having a clear next step, and a stranger who finds it having no idea what to do with a little white disc.
Do this before you leave the house. You will not want to be figuring out app settings while also dealing with a missing bag.
You don't actually have to buy an Apple AirTag
Here's a detail that gets buried: Apple opened up its Find My network to third-party trackers, so there's a whole ecosystem of Apple-compatible tags beyond the official one. Some come in genuinely useful shapes the AirTag doesn't — flat, card-style trackers thin enough to slide into a wallet being the obvious one. There's even luggage now shipping with tracking hardware built directly into the shell.
The tradeoff is real, though. Apple's own AirTag has a Precision Finding feature powered by an Ultra Wideband chip, which is the difference between your phone giving you a literal directional arrow and distance countdown pointing you straight to your bag, versus a third-party tracker that can only tell you it's "somewhere nearby" over Bluetooth. If you've ever tried to pinpoint something using only a vague signal strength indicator, you know how much that precision actually matters when you're standing in a crowded arrivals hall.
The takeaway
None of this is complicated once you know it — it's just not obvious until someone tells you. Check your battery for that bitterant coating, keep a spare packed, put the tag inside your bag instead of dangling off it, get Lost Mode set up before you ever need it, and decide deliberately whether Apple's precision tracking is worth it over a cheaper third-party option. Small adjustments, but they're the difference between an AirTag that's basically decorative and one that actually does its job when it counts.
— The fyiMac Team
Original reporting: Executive Traveller
