Lost luggage. If you travel with any frequency, chances are, you’ve had an airline (or a train, or bus) lose your bags at least once. If not you, you probably know someone who has experienced this stress.
It’s a painful experience. For me, it’s only happened once, but I will not soon forget waiting at the baggage carousel at 11:55 p.m. at Washington’s Reagan National Airport, hoping my bag would eventually come out. I eventually realized my bag was not coming, and discovered that it didn’t make a connection in Minneapolis, and as a result, the airline would get it to me the next day. With business meetings the next day, I mentally prepared myself for the humbling experience of waking up at 7:30 a.m. and putting on my past day’s clothes and going to Target — the only store open that early in the morning — to buy a new outfit.
Now I’ve learned that there’s a gadget out there that while not exactly solving the problem of the airline losing my luggage, at least would have given me the peace of mind that it was not where I was and that it was somewhere else.
The gadget is called Trakdot. Trakdot is a cellular-enabled device that can determine its location and send messages to its owner letting the owner know where it is. If Trakdot is inside a piece of luggage, as its intended, you can understand how it would alert one of the location of said bags.
According to Trakdot product information, the device goes to sleep while flying, but once on the ground and re-connected to a cellular network, Trakdot will report its location via text message or email to its owner. So if I’d have had this device during my aforementioned lost luggage ordeal, I’d have at least known that my bag was still at the Minneapolis airport and wouldn't have had to rely on the apologetic-yet-not-entirely-accurate updates from my airline about my bag’s status.
