Europe's October 2026 Strike Wave: What It Means for Your Luggage

Europe's autumn strike season arrived early this year, and it's already hit the continent's biggest airports. On September 30, a four-hour air traffic control walkout in Italy cancelled 308 flights and delayed another 1,746 across 23 major European hubs — not just in Italy, but in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Hungary, and Romania too. Two days later, a national strike in Portugal shut down schools, public services, and hundreds of flights, while a separate rail strike in Italy disrupted airport access in five major cities. A French aviation strike notice covering October 17–21 is still pending. None of this is unusual for European autumn travel, but the clustering is — and it's a useful moment to look at what actually happens to your luggage when a trip gets disrupted, and what, concretely, reduces the damage.

Jump to: what's happening this October · why disruption means more lost luggage · normal day vs. strike day · who this affects most · how to check your flight · protecting checked luggage · protecting what you carry with you · which Seekerity product fits · if you're flying this month · why Find My matters most when things go wrong · what's still coming · FAQ

Quick answer

• Yes, this is a genuinely disruptive stretch, not just the usual seasonal grumbling. An ENAV air traffic control strike on September 30 grounded or delayed over 2,000 flights across 23 European airports in a single afternoon, and Italy, Portugal, and potentially France all have separate strike action landing within the same few weeks.
• Strikes create more lost-luggage risk than ordinary delays — rebooked passengers, missed connections, and bags re-sorted by hand (instead of by the normal automated system) are the three biggest drivers of bags going missing, and strikes cause all three at once.
• A checked bag is best protected by something attached to it, not loose inside it — the Seekerity Smart Lock is a TSA-approved padlock with Apple Find My tracking built into the lock body itself, so there's nothing separate to buy or lose track of.
• What you carry on your person is just as exposed during a strike — passports, wallets, and cards get set down at rebooking desks, in hotel lobbies, and on rental counters far more often when a trip goes sideways. The Smart Tracking Card slips into a passport pouch, wallet, or daypack to cover that gap.
• Compensation rules depend on who called the strike — a strike by the airline's own staff is generally treated differently under EU261 than an external strike (air traffic control, airport ground staff, a national public-sector action). It's worth checking the specific cause of your delay before assuming you are or aren't covered, and this article isn't a substitute for checking with your airline or a consumer-rights body directly.
• More disruption is already scheduled — a second wave of Portuguese cabin crew strikes is booked for December 19–23, squarely inside the Christmas travel period, and France's October 17–21 notice is still unresolved.

What's actually happening across Europe's airports this October

Travel disruption in Europe tends to arrive in waves rather than isolated incidents, and the last week of September into the first week of October has produced a particularly dense one. It's worth laying out each piece separately, because they have different causes, different scopes, and different implications for anyone with a trip booked.

September 30: an Italian air traffic control strike disrupted 23 airports — most of them outside Italy

On September 30, ENAV staff and members of the Uiltrasporti union held a four-hour walkout, from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM local time, affecting air traffic control across all 33 Italian airports. Because so much of Europe's air traffic routes through or near Italian airspace, the knock-on effect reached well beyond Italy itself: 23 major hubs recorded disruption that afternoon, including Frankfurt, Paris Charles de Gaulle, Amsterdam Schiphol, Munich, London Heathrow, Berlin-Brandenburg, and several Italian airports including Rome Fiumicino, Milan Malpensa, Bologna, Venice, and Naples, along with airports in Austria, Hungary, and Romania.

The numbers from that single afternoon: 308 flights cancelled and 1,746 delayed. Ryanair, easyJet, Wizz Air Malta, Lufthansa, Air France, and KLM were among the most affected carriers, with Wizz Air Malta (44) and Ryanair (41) recording the most cancellations, and Lufthansa (156) and Ryanair (129) the most delays. This is the kind of disruption that doesn't stay contained to one airline or one country — a four-hour window in Italian airspace rippled through flight schedules across the continent for the rest of that day and into the next.

October 2: a national strike in Italy grounded regional trains and strained airport access in five cities

Two days later, a separate national strike called by the CSLE trade union hit Italy's rail network. Regional Trenitalia and Trenord services stopped during an 11:00 AM–2:00 PM window, though the long-distance Frecciarossa, Frecciargento, and Frecciabianca services were guaranteed to run, as was the privately-operated Italo high-speed network. The practical effect for travelers was concentrated in getting to and from the airport rather than in the flights themselves: Milan's Malpensa Express, for instance, was replaced by direct buses between Milan Cadorna and Malpensa Terminal 1, with noticeably less capacity than the train it replaced. Milan, Rome, Venice, Naples, and Florence all saw disruption, with Milan hit hardest because Trenord controls most of the regional rail network in Lombardy.

This is a useful distinction to hold onto: a rail strike that strands you on the way to the airport creates exactly the same risk to your luggage and your schedule as a flight delay does, but it sits in a legal grey area, since the EU261 passenger-rights framework that covers flight disruption generally doesn't extend to a missed flight caused by a train that never showed up.

October 2–6: a general strike and a separate airline-specific strike hit Portugal at the same time

Portugal had two overlapping strikes running simultaneously this week. The CGTP union's general strike closed schools, slowed public services, and cancelled a significant number of flights nationwide. At the same time, cabin crew employed by easyJet's Portuguese operation, represented by the SNPVAC union, registered a separate strike action — also running October 2–6 — specifically affecting easyJet's services out of Lisbon, Porto, and Faro, three of the country's busiest airports and key gateways for autumn travel to Portugal.

Worth noting: a strike notice from one airline's cabin crew doesn't mean an entire airport shuts down, or that every flight through it is cancelled. Other airlines serving the same airports typically continue operating close to normal schedules. The practical takeaway is to check your specific flight and airline rather than assuming blanket disruption — but if you are flying easyJet through Lisbon, Porto, or Faro this week, it's worth building in extra buffer time and keeping an eye on your flight status.

October 17–21: a French aviation strike notice is still pending, timed against school holidays

Five French unions representing pilots and cabin crew — SNPL, UNSA PNC, SNPNC-FO, SNGAF, and UNAC — have filed a strike notice covering October 17–21, in a dispute over proposed changes to pension and retirement rules affecting flight crews (specifically the CRPN pension system). The notice affects flights operated by crews under French employment law, which includes Air France and Transavia France. As of now, this is a notice rather than a confirmed walkout — the unions have said they remain open to negotiation, and a strike notice doesn't guarantee every flight will actually be cancelled. What makes the timing notable is that it lands squarely inside France's Toussaint school holiday period, one of the busiest weeks of the autumn for leisure travel.

Taken individually, each of these is a fairly routine entry in Europe's recurring cycle of transport action. Taken together, inside a roughly three-week window, they add up to a genuinely elevated chance that a trip through Italy, Portugal, or France this October runs into some form of disruption — which is the actual reason this is worth planning around, rather than any single headline number.

It isn't only strikes — a separate baggage system fault hit Heathrow weeks earlier

Strikes are the clearest, most predictable source of this autumn's disruption, but they're not the only one, and it's worth knowing that the underlying risk — systems getting overloaded, bags getting handled manually instead of automatically — shows up from non-strike causes too. On Thursday, September 5, a technical fault in the automated baggage-handling system at London Heathrow's Terminal 5 left roughly 3,000 British Airways bags behind on the ground while passengers boarded their flights without them. Heathrow attributed the fault to its own infrastructure rather than anything British Airways did operationally, and the airport confirmed the issue was resolved the same day, but the pattern is the same one strikes produce: a system built for a steady, predictable flow of bags gets pushed past what it can handle cleanly, and the result is bags that don't travel with their owners. It's the second time in 2026 that Terminal 5 has had a baggage-system failure of this kind, after a larger one in May left around 20,000 bags stranded.

The takeaway isn't that Heathrow specifically is unusually risky — it's that "disruption" this autumn has come from more than one direction, and a tracker doesn't care which direction it came from. Whether a bag is delayed by a strike, a software fault, or an overloaded conveyor system, the thing that actually helps you is the same: knowing where it is without having to wait and see.

Why strikes create more lost-luggage risk than an ordinary delay

A flight delayed by bad weather is disruptive, but it's a fairly contained kind of disruption: the bag that was checked in for your 10 AM flight is still on your 1 PM flight, tracked the whole way by the same automated baggage system. A strike-driven disruption behaves differently, and it's worth understanding exactly why, because it changes what actually protects you.

Rebooking breaks the chain between you and your bag

When a flight is cancelled outright rather than delayed, your bag has usually already gone through check-in and into the system for the original flight. Getting it onto your replacement flight — especially if that flight is with a different airline, out of a different terminal, or on a different day — requires a human to physically intervene and re-route it. Every manual step in that process is a point where a bag can end up on the wrong aircraft, in the wrong terminal, or simply left behind while the rebooking desk works through a queue of a few hundred other passengers in the same situation.

Missed connections multiply, and connections are where bags go missing

Industry data consistently shows that misconnected bags — bags that didn't make a tight connection — are one of the single largest causes of mishandled luggage, well ahead of bags that are outright lost or damaged. A strike that delays your first flight by even 90 minutes can turn a comfortable connection into an impossible one, and once you're rebooked onto a later connecting flight, your bag needs to be found, pulled, and physically moved to the new one. This is exactly the scenario that produces a bag arriving a day or two after you do.

Automated sorting gives way to manual handling

Modern baggage systems are largely automated: a bag's tag is scanned and a conveyor system routes it to the correct aircraft with very little human handling in between. When a strike disrupts a flight schedule heavily enough — multiple cancelled and rebooked flights moving through the same hub in a short window — ground staff often end up manually resorting bags that the automated system can no longer route cleanly. Manual handling is inherently more error-prone than a scanner-driven conveyor system, which is part of why disruption events tend to produce spikes in mishandled-baggage reports industry-wide, not just a proportional increase matching the number of delayed flights.

None of this means a strike guarantees your bag goes missing — most bags, even during serious disruption, still arrive where they're supposed to. It means the odds shift, in a fairly predictable way, toward exactly the kind of multi-step mishandling that a location tracker is built to catch early rather than find out about at an empty baggage carousel.

A worked example: what rebooking actually does to a bag's journey

Picture a fairly ordinary itinerary: a connecting flight through Rome, checked straight through to a final destination, with a 70-minute layover — comfortable under normal conditions. Your first flight is delayed 50 minutes by the ENAV-style disruption described above. You still make your connection on foot, but your bag, which was already loaded and is now sitting in a different part of the aircraft's hold than the ground crew expected given the compressed turnaround, doesn't get pulled and transferred in time. You land; your bag doesn't. This isn't a dramatic failure by anyone involved — it's what happens when a system built around a 70-minute buffer gets a 50-minute delay and nobody puts the buffer back. It's also precisely the scenario where a Find My check before you've even left the departure gate — "is my bag still showing as moving with this aircraft, or has it stopped?" — turns a multi-day mystery into a same-day fix, because you can tell the ground staff at your destination exactly what you already know, rather than waiting for their systems to catch up.

For context on baseline rates: even without any unusual disruption, baggage mishandling has been trending upward across the industry through 2026, with several Department of Transportation reports this year flagging rising mishandled-bag rates and flight delays as a connected trend. That's the steady-state number headline strikes get added on top of — not a reason for alarm, but a reasonable basis for treating "pack a tracker" as ordinary preparation rather than an overreaction to a single news cycle.

A normal travel day vs. a strike-disrupted one

Risk factor	Normal travel day	Strike-disrupted day
How your bag is routed	Automated conveyor and scanning system	Often partly manual, as ground staff re-sort around cancelled flights
Connection time	As booked, usually with a comfortable buffer	Frequently compressed or eliminated by rebooking onto a later flight
Who physically handles your bag	The airline you checked in with, start to finish	Potentially a different airline or ground handler after rebooking
Time your bag spends unaccompanied in a terminal	Minimal — it tracks your flight timing closely	Can stretch to hours while you queue at a rebooking desk
How quickly you'd notice a bag is missing	At baggage claim, roughly on schedule	Potentially not until well after your (delayed, rerouted) arrival
Value of a live location check	Reassuring, rarely essential	Genuinely useful — confirms your bag made the rebooked flight before you reach the carousel

Who this actually affects most

Not every traveler is equally exposed to this particular stretch of disruption, and it's worth being specific about who should be paying closer attention than usual.

• Anyone connecting through a major European hub, rather than flying point-to-point. A direct flight that gets delayed is just late. A connection that gets delayed can turn into a missed flight, a rebooking, and exactly the chain of events described above — so if your itinerary routes through Rome, Milan, Lisbon, Paris, or one of the other hubs mentioned in this piece, you're carrying more risk than someone flying directly.
• Business travelers with tight, back-to-back schedules. A leisure trip can usually absorb a half-day delay. A trip built around a meeting at a fixed time the next morning can't, and that time pressure is exactly what pushes people into the rushed, repeated set-it-down-and-move-on behavior that leads to a wallet or passport getting left behind at a rebooking desk.
• Families and groups traveling with checked bags for everyone. More checked bags means more individual chances for one of them to be the one that gets misrouted during a disrupted connection — the risk scales roughly with bag count, not just with the trip itself.
• Anyone flying through Lisbon, Porto, or Faro specifically this week, given the easyJet cabin crew action running through October 6, or through French airspace on an Air France or Transavia France ticket between October 17–21, if that notice proceeds.

If none of that describes your trip — a short direct flight with no connection, well outside the affected window — the baseline advice in this piece still applies, just with lower stakes attached to it.

How to check if your specific flight is actually affected

Rather than reading headlines and assuming the worst, a few concrete checks tell you much more about your actual trip:

• Your airline's own app or website status page is the most reliable first stop — airlines update flight-specific status well before a strike or disruption event, often 24–48 hours ahead when the cause is a known, scheduled action like a strike notice rather than sudden weather.
• The departure airport's own website usually carries a general advisory when a strike or system fault is affecting operations airport-wide, separate from your specific flight's status.
• Eurocontrol's network operations updates track air traffic control disruption across European airspace in near real time, and are a useful second opinion if you suspect a delay is part of a wider pattern rather than specific to your flight.
• Your connecting airport's status, not just your departure airport's, if your itinerary has a layover — a clean departure can still turn into a missed connection if the problem is at the hub you're connecting through, not where you started.

Protecting checked luggage: a loose tracker vs. a lock that tracks

There are two common ways travelers add Apple Find My tracking to a checked bag, and the difference matters more during exactly the kind of disruption described above.

Option 1: drop a loose tracker inside the bag

This tells you your bag's approximate location, but it does nothing to secure the bag itself, and during a stretch of manual re-sorting, a bag's zipper being openly accessible is not a small detail. A loose tracker can also shift to the bottom of a packed suitcase, which doesn't stop it from transmitting location but can make it harder to locate precisely if you're trying to confirm it's genuinely with you and not in a pile of similar bags at a transfer desk.

Option 2: a lock with Find My tracking built into the lock body

The Seekerity Smart Lock combines both functions in a single piece of hardware: it's a TSA-approved padlock securing your zipper, with Apple Find My tracking built into the lock itself. There's nothing extra to buy, place inside the bag, or dig out from under your clothes to check. Because it's attached externally, at the point your bag would be opened, it also means the one thing most likely to get separated from a disrupted bag — the thing holding it closed — is the same thing telling you where it is.

For a deeper comparison of locked trackers against a loose AirTag specifically, see our full luggage tracker guide.

Protecting what you carry with you, not just what you check

Checked luggage gets most of the attention in a conversation about airport disruption, but the things you keep on your own body — your wallet, cards, and passport — are arguably more exposed during a strike, not less. Here's why: a checked bag sits in a system, even a disrupted one. A wallet gets set down.

Think through what a rebooking actually looks like: you're standing at a desk for twenty minutes working out a replacement itinerary, reaching for your passport and card repeatedly, setting them on the counter to free up your hands, picking up a printed boarding pass, moving to a different queue, then another. Hotel check-ins booked at the last minute because of an overnight delay add another round of the same pattern. Every one of those moments is an ordinary opportunity to walk away from a counter without your wallet — not because of anything the strike itself does directly, but because disruption multiplies the number of times you set things down in unfamiliar places under time pressure.

A slim tracker solves this the same way it solves the checked-bag problem: it doesn't prevent you from momentarily setting something down, but it means the moment you do leave it behind, you get a notification rather than discovering the gap at the departure gate.

If you'd rather track your wallet itself as a single object rather than slipping a card into an existing one, the Smart Cardholder is Seekerity's ultra-slim cardholder with the same Find My tracking built directly in — worth considering if a strike-disrupted trip means you're likely to be reaching for your cards more often than usual, in more unfamiliar places. And since the two things most often set down and forgotten during a rushed rebooking aren't just a wallet — keys for a rental car or a hotel locker tend to come out at the same moments — the Everyday Carry Kit, which pairs the Smart Cardholder with Seekerity's trackable Key Organizer, covers both at once for less than buying them separately. It's a reasonable upgrade for a business traveler whose itinerary this month routes through any of the airports named above, where a single missed connection can turn into an overnight hotel stay with a rental key and a hotel keycard added to the mix.

Which Seekerity product actually fits your trip

Product	What it protects	Best for	Price
Smart Lock	Checked suitcase, backpack, or travel bag	Anyone checking a bag on a route that could face rerouting or a long layover	€44.95
Smart Tracking Card	Wallet, passport pouch, daypack, laptop sleeve	Anyone who'll be at rebooking desks, hotel counters, or unfamiliar terminals	€34.95
Smart Cardholder	Your cards and cash, as a standalone wallet	Replacing a regular wallet with one that's trackable by design	€54.95
Travel Essentials Kit	Checked bag plus one carry-on item	Covering both bases in a single order, at a lower combined price	€74.90

If you're flying through Italy, Portugal, or France in the coming weeks

Beyond adding a tracker, a few practical steps make a genuine difference when disruption is a realistic possibility rather than a remote one:

• Check your specific flight and airline before assuming the worst. A strike notice covering one airline's crew, or one country's rail network, rarely grounds every departure at an airport. Your flight may run close to normal even on a day with real disruption elsewhere in the same system.
• Build in extra connection time if you can still choose your itinerary. A tight connection is the single biggest multiplier of lost-luggage risk during disrupted travel; an extra 60–90 minutes buys real protection against a missed bag transfer.
• Keep genuinely essential items in your carry-on, not your checked bag, for any trip during a period with active strike notices — medication, chargers, a change of clothes, and anything irreplaceable. This is standard travel advice, but it matters more, not less, when checked bags are more likely to be delayed rather than lost outright.
• Know the difference between a delay and a cancellation for compensation purposes. Under EU261, compensation eligibility often depends on whether the disruption was caused by the airline's own staff (which can count toward compensation) versus an external cause like air traffic control or a national strike by non-airline staff (generally treated as an "extraordinary circumstance," which typically limits compensation but doesn't eliminate your right to rerouting or care such as meals and accommodation). This is a genuinely fact-specific area, and the right answer depends on your exact situation — check directly with your airline or an official consumer-rights resource rather than relying on a general rule of thumb.
• File a report immediately if a bag doesn't arrive — a Property Irregularity Report, filed at the airport before you leave or online within the airline's stated window, is the starting point for both locating a delayed bag and any compensation claim.

Why Find My tracking matters most when a trip goes wrong, not when it goes right

It's easy to think of a luggage tracker as insurance against a rare, dramatic loss — a bag that vanishes entirely. In practice, the more common and more useful job it does is much smaller and much more frequent: confirming, at a glance, that a bag actually made it onto the rebooked flight before you've reached the carousel to find out the hard way, or getting a left-behind alert from a rebooking desk counter while you're still in the terminal and can turn around.

That's consistent with how Seekerity's products are built generally — no subscription, no separate app, and tracking that runs on Apple's own Find My network through the same iPhone you already carry, rather than requiring you to manage one more account during a trip that's already asking you to manage a lot. Each product also runs on a single battery for roughly 6–12 months depending on use, is splash and light-rain resistant (though not built for submersion), and is backed by a 1-year warranty against manufacturing defects and a 30-day money-back guarantee — the kind of ordinary reliability that matters more, not less, on the one trip where everything else about your schedule is being rewritten in real time.

It's also worth being precise about what "tracking" means here, because the word can sound more dramatic than the reality. Find My locates an item using encrypted signals relayed anonymously by nearby Apple devices — it isn't a live GPS feed, it isn't monitored by anyone but you, and Seekerity itself has no visibility into where your bag, wallet, or keys actually are. The privacy model is end-to-end encrypted by design: not even Seekerity can see your location data. That's a deliberate design choice, not an afterthought, and it's the same reason this is framed throughout this piece as a calm, practical precaution rather than something to be anxious about. A tracker doesn't change how likely disruption is. It just means that if it happens to you, you're not finding out blind.

What's still coming, and why "this week" isn't the whole story

Two things are worth flagging specifically because they extend this beyond a single news cycle. First, the French strike notice for October 17–21 remains unresolved as of publication — it may be averted through negotiation, scaled back, or go ahead largely as filed, and it's worth checking back closer to the date if you have travel booked through French airspace or French-crewed carriers during that window. Second, and less widely noticed: Portugal's easyJet cabin crew union has already registered a second strike action for December 19–23, placing it directly inside the Christmas travel period — a useful reminder that this particular dispute isn't resolved, and that a quiet November doesn't mean the underlying issue has gone away.

None of this is a reason to avoid booking travel through the affected countries this autumn and winter. European strike action is, historically, a recurring feature of the season rather than an exceptional one, and the overwhelming majority of flights even during active strike periods still operate close to normal. It is, however, a reasonable prompt to treat "pack a tracker" as a standard part of trip preparation for the next few months specifically, the same way you'd check a weather forecast before a winter departure.

Frequently asked questions

Is it actually worse than a normal autumn for European travel disruption?

The clustering is unusual, even if no single event is. An air traffic control strike affecting 23 airports in one afternoon, a national strike in a second country two days later, and a third country's strike notice pending within the same month is a denser run of disruption than a typical autumn, even though strikes themselves are a routine part of the European travel calendar.

Will my flight definitely be cancelled if I'm flying through Italy, Portugal, or France this month?

No. A strike notice, even a confirmed one, rarely grounds every flight at every affected airport. Many flights operate close to schedule even during active strike periods. Check your specific flight and airline directly rather than assuming blanket disruption.

Does a Find My tracker actually prevent my luggage from being lost?

No tracker prevents mishandling — that's down to the airline and ground handling systems. What it does is tell you where your bag actually is, in close to real time, so you find out about a problem from a notification rather than at an empty carousel, and so you have concrete information (a location, a last-seen time) to give the airline when you file a report.

Is a loose AirTag in my suitcase good enough, or do I need the Smart Lock specifically?

A loose tracker will tell you your bag's approximate location, which is genuinely useful. The Smart Lock adds a TSA-approved lock in the same piece of hardware, so you're not buying and attaching a separate lock, and the tracking is attached at the point the bag would actually be opened rather than sitting loose inside it.

Am I entitled to compensation if a strike delays or cancels my flight?

It depends on the specific cause, and this is genuinely fact-specific enough that we'd rather point you to the right resource than oversimplify it. Under EU261, disruption caused by the airline's own staff is generally treated differently from disruption caused by an external party, such as air traffic control or a national public-sector strike. Either way, you typically retain rerouting rights and a right to care (meals, accommodation if needed) even when monetary compensation doesn't apply — but check with your airline or an official consumer-rights resource for your specific situation rather than relying on a general rule.

What should I pack in my carry-on specifically because of strike risk?

The standard advice applies with more weight than usual: medication, chargers, a change of clothes, and anything irreplaceable. If your checked bag is more likely to be delayed rather than permanently lost, a carry-on that covers you for an unplanned extra day or two is the practical insurance.

Does the Smart Tracking Card need its own subscription or app?

No. It connects through Apple's free Find My app, the same one that already tracks your iPhone, AirPods, and Apple Watch. There's no separate app to install and no monthly fee.

Will airport security have a problem with a tracker in checked luggage?

Small Bluetooth trackers like Seekerity's are widely permitted in checked bags by major airlines, since they use low-power button-cell batteries. It's still worth checking your specific airline's current battery guidance before an international trip, since rules can vary and do get updated.

If the French strike for October 17–21 doesn't happen, was this all for nothing?

No — the September 30 air traffic control strike and the Portugal and Italy actions in early October already happened and already affected thousands of travelers, independent of whatever happens in France later in the month. The French notice is simply the next dated item on a list that's been unusually active this autumn, not the whole story.

Can Find My tell me my bag is on the wrong flight before I land?

In practical terms, it can tell you whether the Smart Lock is still moving along with your original aircraft's route or has stopped somewhere it shouldn't have — which, combined with your own flight tracking, is usually enough to flag a problem before you've landed and reached the carousel. It won't label a bag "on the wrong flight" automatically, but a location that clearly isn't following your flight path is a strong, early signal worth acting on.

Does Seekerity's tracking require me to have an Android phone covered too, for a mixed-device family?

Find My is an Apple ecosystem feature, so it's read through an iPhone, iPad, or Mac signed into the relevant Apple ID. If you're traveling with someone on Android, they won't be able to view the tracker's location directly in their own device's software, but anyone with access to the associated Apple ID — including through iCloud.com on a non-Apple browser — can check it.