Virgin baggage tracking comes to international flights
The airline says travellers can now track their bags on flights to Bali, Fiji and more.
By Chris Ashton, January 31 2024
Virgin Australia is today expanding its in-app baggage tracking tool to cover almost all of its domestic and international departures, giving it a leg up on rivals as the only Australian carrier offering the functionality across its full network.
Flights to Bali, Fiji, Japan, Queenstown, Samoa and Vanuatu are all newly-added to the app, with Christmas Island and Cocos Keeling Islands the only exceptions to the rule.
Push notifications via the Virgin Australia app alert flyers once luggage is on the plane – and, where relevant, transferred to an international partner airline – and again when the bag is ready for collection.
The notification even lists which carousel bags are ready to collect from.
Though not the first airline to introduce bag tracking – Emirates, United, Qatar Airways and Air New Zealand have all offered it to various degrees – Virgin was the first Australian airline to make the move back in May last year, with Qantas following soon after.
Paul Jones, Virgin Australia Chief Customer & Digital Officer, says it made sense to offer the functionality, noting Australians already find comfort in tracking postal and food deliveries, with the airline’s app delivering that same peace of mind.
“By further enhancing our Australian-first baggage tracking technology to include all international services and additional notifications, we are giving guests the peace of mind to know where their baggage is at every step of the journey,” Jones explains.
Baggage tracking apps and smart tags such as the Apple AirTag are now commonplace in the modern traveller’s arsenal, with lost luggage woes fuelling the desire to keep a closer eye on the whereabouts of your precious belongings.
However, unlike AirTags which deliver (mostly) accurate geo-positioning of a bag, Virgin’s offering does not provide live tracking, relying instead on physical scanning of the bags at each airport.
Additional reporting by David Flynn.
25 Jun 2012
Total posts 61
From first hand experience this is not yet fully functional on domestic trips - definitely not on mine from OOL-ADL-PER on Sunday, nor PER-PHE on Monday.
It worked on the first leg from OOL-ADL, but was so useless I wouldn't get too excited. All it told me was that "We have your bags" - not that the bag was loaded on the plane... just that I had checked it in.
American Airlines also has bag tracking, and it is great. You get updates after checking in a bag, after it being loaded on the plane, after it being transferred from one plane to another and then when it is delivered on the belt.
Feels like Virgin have launched this quickly, but not got it right.
Virgin Australia - Velocity Rewards
17 Mar 2016
Total posts 43
I would agree on that this 'feature' is only half baked at the moment. From all of my flights since the introduction of this service, mostly I have received only the 'We Have Your Bags' message and then maybe a second message as they are placed on the carousel. No loaded on plane or transferred between flights messages and often nothing at the carousel either. The method of scanning is failing them at each point or not being done at all.
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