We make QR tags that get lost bags home.

Why we built it

Every year the airline industry mishandles a few bags out of every thousand checked — SITA’s annual baggage-IT reports put the global figure in the single digits per 1,000 passengers, with the worst stretches (post-pandemic 2022, summer 2023) running noticeably higher. Most of those bags catch up with their owners within a few days. The ones that don’t are usually the ones nobody could identify on sight.

Bluetooth trackers tell youwhere the bag is. They don’t tell the finderwho the bag belongs to. A printed phone number on a paper tag does the opposite — identifies the owner but only if the finder bothers to dial, navigates voicemail, and the owner picks up an unknown number while their phone’s in flight mode. We wanted the simplest possible bridge between “a stranger has my bag” and “the bag is on its way back”. Scan a QR, tap a button, the owner gets a text. That’s the whole product.

Forking from our pet-tag sister product Snifftag let us reuse two years of work on the QR-scan landing page, the SMS routing and the contact-management infrastructure. BagBeacon launched as a focused luggage service in 2026, with its own product range, fulfilment lanes and pricing.

How the service actually runs

When somebody scans a BagBeacon, they land on a page hosted on bagbeacon.com— not an app, not a redirect. They see the bag description and any safety notes you’ve published, and a single button: “Share my location”. Tapping it grabs the device’s GPS reading (with the finder’s explicit browser permission) and converts it to a what3words address accurate to about 10 metres. We send up to five contacts you specified an SMS plus an email. The finder’s phone number is never shown to you unless they choose to leave a message.

Behind the scenes we use Stripe for billing (UK and US accounts, sub-tax handled automatically), Twilio for SMS delivery via a Messaging Service with the “BagBeacon” alphanumeric sender ID for UK recipients, Microsoft Graph for transactional email from hello@bagbeacon.com, what3words for the human-readable coordinates, and Printify (UK) plus Prodigi (US) for the printed luggage tags. The application itself is a Next.js app deployed on Railway with a Postgres data tier; the codebase is private but the service runs on well-understood, audit-friendly building blocks.

What we don’t do

We don’t track your bag. The QR is passive — nothing happens until someone scans it. There’s no broadcasting Bluetooth signal, no cellular ping, no battery to die.

We don’t sell or share your data. The finder’s shared location goes to you. The contact list you set up stays private to your account. We do not run third-party advertising trackers on the marketing site beyond a privacy-first analytics tag, and we don’t feed anything to data brokers. See our privacy policy for the boring detail.

We don’t lock you in. Cancel anytime from your billing page. If you only travel seasonally we offer a free 3-month pause, once per 12 months, that keeps your tags working without billing.

Where we’re based

BagBeacon operates from the United Kingdom with US-side fulfilment via Prodigi. Stripe billing is split across our UK and US entities so customers see prices in their local currency without cross-border fees. Customer support is hello@bagbeacon.com — replied to by a human, usually within one working day.

The honest pitch

A QR luggage tag won’t stop your bag going astray. The airline’s own barcoded sticker is what its sorting system uses, and when that goes wrong, no QR on the outside changes anything. Where BagBeacon earns its keep is the moment a human picks the bag up — an airline rep at lost-and-found, a hotel concierge, a fellow passenger. From that moment, you’re minutes away from getting it back instead of days.

From £2 / $2.50 a month for up to 2 bags, £6.99 / $7.99 for up to 8. Cancel anytime.