gpeso8

My experiences were pretty good up until a month ago when I was travelling LAX-DOH-SIN. Received a notification when I arrived at LAX, but nothing in DOH and SIN (where my bag was the first on the carousel).

lpeterman

I continue to use Trakdot and have no problems.

Current trip so far had good results in HKG, TAO, SIN, and BOM.

Will travel to DOH this Friday and will see what happens there. My experience is if my GSM phone works, this unit will also.

Cerberus

I have two Trakdots with lifetime purchased on both. I do use them on my weekly trips.

There was some major outages for two weeks in the last month that resulted in the iOS/Android apps being completely locked out but the units still emailed when they showed up near an airport.

My opinion on their app sucks. The interface is garbage and looks like it was made during the iOS 4 era (Yeah, probably more like iOS 8 though). The BT component has never worked for me, but then again if it's within BT range -- pretty damn sure I can see it!

I will say this, the few times the airlines have lost my luggage (always on vacation, never for work!); we were able to locate our baggage faster than Air Canada. In one instance, we were able to validate that our bags were at OGG's baggage lockup after arriving late by 24h. AC was telling us that our bags were still in LAX!

At the end of the day, what you're paying for is a piece of mind. I always feel better that I know my luggage is just waiting to come down the ramp because it's told me via SMS/email that it's at my destination with me.

And yes, I've used it throughout North America, Asia, and Europe.

Loren Pechtel

I've been using them (infrequent travel, though) since they had a promo that offered a lifetime license.

I have mine set to e-mail. When it gets close enough to an airport I get an e-mail telling me so. I have gotten a spurious e-mail from an airport we flew over during landing.

The one downside I see is that if your batteries go dead it will fail to transmit. They can go from OK to dead on a transpac flight. The instructions recommend fresh batteries for each flight, the failure happened when using the same batteries for the return flight.

It won't actually tell you the suitcase didn't make the connection, you just will only get a message saying it arrived at the connection but you won't get one saying it arrived at the destination. You can't tell if it was left behind, is still in the air somewhere (misrouted, or routed on a later flight) or the battery died.

I think it would be improved by sending out messages saying where it is (assuming it's someplace it can send a message at all) say every 4 hours. Other than that, while it's not as good as we would like I think it's about as good as you can get from something of the sort.

Loren Pechtel

Yup, this is why I bought them. So far they haven't lost a bag on us but if they do I want to know if it's in the same airport I'm in or not.

02BNFR

I have two of them and both have gone totally dark recently. On Monday, we flew from IAD to BCN and I did not receive any notifications from either device from either airport. Not very helpful at all.

fartoomanyusers

I recently had problems where it didn't even log 3 out of the 5 airports I flew through, and no notifications received for any.

I've just messaged them through their website to ask if they still exist.

gpeso8

I was a big fan of the product but the last few months my device has either been defective or something is wrong with service, some airports register but the majority fail to register.

jason8612

If you mean trakdot, check your spam folder. Last few months all of my notifications have been going to spam for some reason.

DragonSoul

A year on and this seems to still no further along.

fartoomanyusers

when i queried why it wasn't working ... they told me that their text messages are sometimes blocked by the telcos as well.

i'm not going to renew my subscription to a service that is this flaky.

shame, i thought it was an excellent concept.

xray

Haven't been getting trakdot texts or emails reliably lately but try signing into your account and you can usually see where your bag is...

It was so promising at the beginning but lately haven't heard much. As well, people who went in on their latest advance buy of the newest product are also out of the loop.

02BNFR

I just returned from a trip to France, and both of my devices worked a little better than earlier this year, but still not as good as a year or so ago. One of my devices is consistently slow at connecting to the networks, and neither of them send texts any more.

I see the comments above about the texts and am curious to know why the text function no longer works. Why would the phone company block them?

fartoomanyusers

trakdot support told me:

Many cellular carriers have increased efforts to prevent or reduce SMS spam. As result, this has affected some outgoing Trakdot SMS being blocked, at times randomly.

FastTrak2Elite