Despite the airline previously banning AirTags for reasons understood only by itself, Lufthansa has now support for them in its app and is celebrating the integration.
Officially, AirTags were somehow dangerous and somehow in contravention of some laws somewhere, said Lufthansa in 2022 as it tried to find any excuse to ban them. This was not in any way a response to how all airlines were being caught out with luggage going missing or, say, baggage handlers stealing from passengers.
Lufthansa’s ban lasted a whole three days before the airline said enough already, AirTags are fine. This was less from some technical testing and less from some actual reading of FCC regulations, though the airline tried to safe face by rustling up someone to say the words “risk assessment.”
The German Aviation Authorities (Luftfahrtbundesamt) confirmed today, that they share our risk assessment, that tracking devices with very low battery and transmission power in checked luggage do not pose a safety risk. With that these devices are allowed on Lufthansa flights.
— Lufthansa News (@lufthansaNews) October 12, 2022
In truth, it was clearly that airline passengers had objected, and that airline passengers were inevitably going to ignore Lufthansa’s ban. It may also have even affected passenger numbers, since it’s not a great advert telling customers you don’t want them to know how often their luggage gets lost.
All change
If you can’t stop something, your best option is to embrace it. Maybe you can’t ever smother the use of AirTags, but you can advertise to passengers that you’re finally confident of not losing their baggage.
And you can try to make it sound as if this is something Lufthansa has done instead of Apple. So the airline’s Oliver Schmitt can boast how passengers can now seamlessly track their baggage, “quickly and easily in the event of irregularities.”
There’s no question — it does take work to integrate Apple’s Find My into an app. There is a question over just how many people it takes to do it.
“Our digital products team, the ‘Digital Hangar’ with its approximately 1,000 experts, offers our customers new digital services, transparent information and support along the entire journey every month,” said Lufthansa’s Dieter Vranckx in the same statement.
The new and somehow revolutionary acceptance of AirTags is now available across Lufthansa aircraft as well as sister airlines, SWISS, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines and Eurowings.
Hopefully this will help end tales such as the one of a Canadian couple on vacation in 2022. They reported that because of AirTags, they could see how their baggage got a better tour of Portugal than they did.
