 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here. I picked up a couple of interesting pieces of tech while staying here in the US and I've received a few messages from friends and folks on Twitter interested in hearing a little bit more about the differences between GPS trackers for your luggage, Bluetooth trackers and why you might want one in the first place. So I said I'd record this video to try explain those. So we're currently seeing the site of so-called luggage mountains happening in airports around the world as airports face shortages of baggage handlers and the humans necessary to process these in airports. We're seeing them in the airport I'm traveling to in a few days which is Ben Gurion Airport in Israel. There have been these sites in London Heathrow Airport and they say it may take more than a year before the situation is rectified and in Dublin so that's causing a lot of people to think more carefully about what they can do to make sure that they are reunited with their bag when they arrive at their destination. So the couple of two products in the marketing I'm going to talk about and one very simple method. I made a there's been some interesting threads on the travel subreddit on this very topic and one of the recommendations and I did a video about this is this in my top tip is putting a business card inside your suitcase not on the outside. On the outside the airline will affix a one of those tags that's going to have a scannable barcode and that contains everything that the airline needs to track your bag through the system including your passenger information and from that from there they can get in contact with you but those from time to time might come off or be ripped off and in that case if you have a the TSA or whoever wherever you are in the world may actually open up your suitcase to try to identify whose luggage it is so a very very simple hack that's going to cost you about 10 cent far cheaper than either of these two gizmos is to simply leave a few business cards scattered throughout your suitcase so that if someone does have to open it they can quickly find your cell phone and email address but if you do want to go down the technical route what's the difference between these two types of trackers so bluetooth the trackers have been around for a while and probably the best known brand of those is something called tile this is a tile i've been using them for a while for tracking my wallet because i'm one of those people that tends to forget things it's very good but the limitation of bluetooth is that it's a very short range wireless network that means that your this is only going to be useful if you're pretty much right next to your suitcase now besides tile there's also the samsung galaxy have a tracker apple has its air tag i'm not going to get into the air tag because firstly i'm not an apple user and secondly it's kind of a combination system it's both a local system but that also relies on the fact that there's a lot of them in circulation but if you look at a pure bluetooth tracker like the tile for instance the at the top end these have a range of 400 feet so the way this works is you take one of these little gadgets i've labeled mine according to the bags and you'd put that in your luggage and if you're within 400 feet of the tile it should be able to via bluetooth communicate with your phone you can push a button on an app saying find my luggage and this thing will ring in fact i can do a ring now so it'll it'll do a ring um and that'll allow you to find it now the limitation here if you are trying to find your bag through the baggage mountains we're seeing at the moment in airports this would actually be pretty useful unless every single traveler has thought of this put a tile in their luggage there's only there's only like one of ten ringtones to choose from and you've got a bunch of people trying to find their bags so that's the only limitation i can think of but that's already kind of nitpicking the question really becomes is gps tracking useful and is there any reason to pay a little bit more for the cost associated with the tracky which is a gps tracker that i picked up yesterday in the opinion of most folks who are talking about this on the internet and in my opinion probably not and i'll explain the reason for that bluetooth tracking if your bag does end in a luggage mountain and the in worst-case scenario the airline or the airport says sorry you're on your own go find your bag this actually may be very useful in helping you to pinpoint which bag is yours from a big room you just have to make sure that you put the tile in before verify it's working ring it and it should buzz so i would actually say these are worthwhile investments they're about 20 dollars per tile they sell them and sets of three or four so if you're traveling with four bags you can buy a set of four and put one in each suitcase somewhere that the ringing noise is likely to be audible the gps tracker is different it is a little device with the worldwide data sim embedded in it this is tracky now i mentioned the bluetooth only works for at best 400 feet some of the tiles only work for 150 feet and the actual range you achieve is likely to be less than that if you're you know if it's behind a carousel or there's something physically standing between your phone which is what you need to sort of communicate with these ringers and the ringers so the real world performance is likely to actually be significantly less useful so this is really if your bag is right in front of you in a room gps tracker takes it to the next level these are basically uh there's two ways of finding position via gps at least that i'm aware of one of them is via gps satellite so you have devices like the garmin series of gps navigators popular with outdoor people and uh and uh hikers and they do not have cellular data but they have gps so they're separate things but you can also derive your gps position via cellular data if you're connected to a number of cell phone towers you can triangulate your position just through data so the tracky has a built-in worldwide data sim it works over 2g 3g 4g and they promise international coverage so 2g is a much much slower gsm network that has been sunset in a lot of the world now but theoretically once you have this in your bag and you pay for a subscription uh you should be able to derive your position and this works pretty nicely it's got an app as well and it gives you a nice little satellite picture and you can see where this thing is now this doesn't need to be a luggage tracker you can stick this on your car you can stick this on anything it can track anything literally um so the difference really in terms of cost between a tile between a bluetooth tracker and a gps tracker it's actually fairly similar i think that i paid about 20 dollars for this which in my opinion is actually a great deal right it's uh uh when you have this you own it and when you travel you just need to purchase your data plan uh the tiles are about 20 bucks a unit as well in my opinion as someone who frequently either loses stuff or worries about losing stuff it's actually quite a small price to pay for peace of mind um the advantage of a gps tracker is you will see where in the world your suitcase is you don't need to pay anything for bluetooth it's a uh this has a little battery in it's very low power radio network it's constantly beaming it out so you buy this tracker and you have it in order for this to be useful because it works over data you need to pay a monthly data sim so that the carriers will supply data to this device now there's two main gps trackers for luggage tracking and the market one's called gigo g e g o and the second one is tracky i went for tracky because i like the fact that they made it transparent that you didn't need to you didn't need to commit to a year subscription you can just pay for uh one month subscription the subscription charges tiered upon how frequently this guy updates i went for the one minute polling which is the cheapest but you can actually get five second polling and that's going to cost you a bit more in other words this will report its position every five seconds for me a minute was more than useful enough the big question is is gps tracking going to work in the context of luggage first thing to say why it's probably not necessary is as i mentioned earlier in this video once the airline checking agent tags your bag they know where it is in the system when you've lost your luggage you're more it's more likely to happen that it's in a pile somewhere the airline knows where in the world that pile is located is and it's just the kind of sticky job of finding the bag from the pile for that kind of a situation bluetooth tracking is going to be more useful um for the situation where you truly don't know where your thing is in the universe or on the planet this is going to be more useful but it's going to come at a more expensive cost so for this particular journey because i'm really worried and because a i thought it'd be fun to test these both out i'm going to be using both a bluetooth tracker and a gps tracker and i'm also not going to be forgetting to leave a business card in my luggage just in case i hope this video has provided some information if you're currently traveling and you're worried about those unpleasant looking baggage mountains that you hope your bag's not going to wind up in and you've thought about buying either a gps luggage tracker or a bluetooth luggage tracker my personal recommendation even though i bought this to play around with i would actually just buy a four or five pack of these tile trackers and i would also make try to ensure that you're using a somewhat distinctive ringtone so that in the situation that you find that everyone's using one of these you have a better chance of being able to retrieve your luggage but if you really want to know where in the world your bag is even though in most vast majority of cases the airline already has that info you can pick up a gps tracker final caveat is it going to work in the air probably not it'll probably pick up when you're on the tarmac at your departing airport and arrival airport so you'll be able to see that your bag made it from a to b even if you can't observe it as it's going between a and b thank you for watching more videos about technology and all other subjects like that coming to this youtube channel soon