Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET
Spotminder Passport Holder Air
4.7
ZDNET’s key takeaways
- A passport holder with a built-in Find My tag, 3-year battery, and RFID protection.
Pros & Cons
-
Stylish and functional. -
Excellent finder capability. -
Long battery life.
-
No Google Find Hub support.
Nothing derails your travel plans faster than losing your passport. And it happens more often than you think — I’ve found data that suggests about 0.3 to 0.5% of passports are lost or stolen every year. And it’s a pricey hassle to have one replaced.
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine needed a replacement UK passport because theirs was “lost,” and that little headache cost them close to $250 and took a week. If you lose a UK passport and you’re traveling imminently, you’re out of luck because you can’t get a same-day replacement for lost or stolen passports, only expired ones.
Rules are a bit different in the US, but it’s still a big, expensive headache.
So, it’s best not to lose your passport in the first place, and one of the best ways to keep an eye on your documents is to put them in a holder with a built-in finder tag. Spotminder has what I think is the perfect passport holder.
The basics
Before you read any further, let me make something clear — the Spotminder Passport Holder Air only works with Apple’s Find My network. If you’re an Android user, skip to the bottom, and I’ll give you some options.
Let’s move to the aesthetics. The Passport Holder Air has a luxury feel. It’s made from “Litchi Signature Leather” — not real leather but a vegan, cruelty-free polyurethane polymer — with a pebbled 3D texture that gives it a nice, soft feel in the hand and, in my experience, makes it as hard-wearing as leather.
And the stitching and finish are second to none, making this a very nice bit of kit. To keep it that way, the passport cover comes with its own cover.
It measures 5.62 x 4.01 x 0.43 inches and weighs just a hair over three ounces, which is big enough to hold a passport (well, duh!) and associated travel documents like printed boarding passes or train/cruise tickets. At under half an inch thick, it’s much slimmer than other passport holders I’ve used with built-in finder tags.
As is the case with most modern wallets and passport holders, this one is lined with a material that blocks RF communications.
[Note: Despite all the marketing hype, the risk of having payment cards hacked or stolen via RFID is remote because the built-in security is good, and this isn’t a threat vector that I lose sleep over. Passports are a bit different, and there are apps that allow you to scan biometric passports available to download to a smartphone. But even here, the risk is quite limited since they need to use the camera to scan the machine-readable information on the passport to work.]
Setup, finding and a hidden feature
Setting up the finder holder is easy — Fire up the Find My app on your iPhone or iPad, tap on Add Item and select Other Supported Item, and then press and hold the button inside the holder until you hear a beep.
For those times when you do momentarily misplace your passport, the holder is kitted out with a nice, loud beep that cuts through ambient sound well and makes finding it easier amid whatever chaos you find yourself in.
The holder also has a neat hidden feature — lift up the boarding pass flap to reveal a SIM card eject tool and a slot for a spare SIM. Sure, e-SIMs have started to sideline physical SIM cards when traveling, but a lot of people still swap SIMs the moment they land at a foreign airport.
How Spotminder stacks up to the competition
When discussing finder tags, I always preface the data by noting that there’s a gulf between theoretical Bluetooth performance and real life.
Under perfect lab conditions, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) has a range of 100 to 400 feet (30 to 120 meters) in open, unobstructed conditions. Outside of a perfect, air-conditioned lab environment, there are a lot of things that can affect Bluetooth range, from the general radio-frequency (RF) noisiness of the environment to the antennas in both the smartphone and tag. Also, my indoors will be different from your indoors, so treat my results as data points, not something written in stone.
The tag with the best real-world results is the Apple AirTag, delivering a clear line-of-sight range of 100 to 130 feet (30 to 40 meters), with this dropping to 50 to 65 feet (15 to 20 meters) indoors.
The performance of the Spotminder passport holder wasn’t far behind the AirTag, delivering a clear line-of-sight range of 70 to 100 feet (20 to 30 meters), and about 45 feet (13 meters) indoors. I did notice that the orientation of the holder mattered, and if it was flat on the floor with the tag side down, that gave the worst results.
This is not the first passport holder with a built-in finder tag that I’ve used, so I already had a wish list of improvements that I was hoping for — and I wasn’t disappointed.
The one smart passport holder that’s accompanied me on many a trip over the past few years is made by Satechi. It has been a great bit of kit, but it had a couple of things that niggled at me.
The first is that it’s rather bulky, coming in at close to three-quarters of an inch with nothing in it. That might not seem like much, but it makes the holder feel like a small paperback book.
But the other niggle was bigger: the battery life.
The 150 mAh battery means it needs charging at least twice a year. OK, not a huge inconvenience, because all you need to do is throw it on a Qi/MagSafe wireless charger (no cables to mess with), but it does open up the possibility of you throwing your passport into a drawer or a suitcase compartment, forgetting about it, and then the battery going flat.
I travel relatively regularly, and, well, let’s just say that two days before I was going away, I had a heart-stopping moment earlier this year when, for a moment, I’d forgotten where I’d put my passport.
Spotminder has improved its passport holder by upgrading the battery from a 150 mAh to a 400 mAh cell that’s good for up to three years between recharges. And when the battery does get low — it’ll tell you this in the Find My app of your iPhone — a full charge only takes three hours.
For me, this is a game-changer. I know that I’m going to find time to charge up the holder at some point over three years, so there’s zero chance of this going flat in a drawer somewhere.
It’s a small thing, but it means I have one less thing to worry about.
ZDNET buyer’s guide
$70 might seem like a lot to pay for the Spotminder Passport Holder Air for your passport, but for me, it’s a piece of insurance that’s come in handy more than once already when I’ve gone “gahhhhhhhh” and frantically patted all my pockets because I was convinced that the passport that was in my pocket a moment ago is now on another continent. Compared on price, the Satechi Passport Holder is $10 less but has a much shorter battery life.
And if this holder helps you locate a lost passport, it will have more than paid for itself.
Having tested — and used — a few of these passport holders, I’m willing to say that the Passport Holder Air is the best option for iPhone users. For Android users, the options are a lot more sparse — you could slip a wallet finder card into your existing passport holder, or there’s a holder out there seems pretty good based on reviews, but I’ve not tested so I can’t be certain.
For those iPhone users who want to protect multiple passports, you can pick up a three-pack for $170, saving you $40 compared to buying them separately.
The passport holder comes in black and brown (although the three-pack is only available for the black version).
