Let’s face it, there are few things as disconcerting as showing up at Baggage Claim after your flight to be the last one standing when the carousel stops and you’re left stranded without your luggage. Sometimes, it's even worse. Pity the nearly 2,000 British Airways passengers on March 19 who arrived on flights into London’s Heathrow Airport only to be told to abandon their quest after waiting for hours for their luggage to be offloaded from their aircraft. In the end, it became apparent their baggage wasn’t going to arrive so those tired and frustrated travelers were actually ordered to leave the airport without their belongings! The carrier suffered an earlier baggage disaster which the airline blamed on Storm Eunice. In that incident, thousands of passengers were again ordered to leave Heathrow without their belongings and instead lodge a lost property claim on the BA Web site. So many passengers were affected that the airline's Web site crashed when it became inundated with customers trying to file their claims. BA notwithstanding, the industry claims it’s getting better at not losing our luggage, partly through improved tracking technology. But, tens of millions of bags still go astray every single year. In fact, in 2018 alone, nearly twenty-five million bags were mishandled. So, is the industry really doing enough?
We’ll look into that. But first, let's start with some good news emanating from SITA. This multinational information technology company offers IT and telecommunication services to the air transport industry. The company provides its services to around 400 members and 2,500 customers worldwide, which it claims is about 90 per cent of the world's airline business. They monitor global baggage handling and have reported that the total number of “mishandled” bags has fallen from 46.9 million in 2007 to 24.8 million in 2018. While these are pre-pandemic numbers, this was a period when the total number of air passengers nearly doubled. Little comfort to those unfortunate BA passengers last month though.
If the numbers of luggage mishaps has actually decreased, what’s contributed to the decline? For their part, Delta Air Lines now includes a tiny RFID (radio frequency identification) tag in the now-familiar barcoded luggage tag that wraps around your bag handle. This means each bag can be scanned automatically by machines as it weaves its way through the airport systems. Delta says that wandering bags can be spotted more easily via a central monitoring system. "You could assume that of the 150 million bags we move every year, each one is getting a tag," says Gareth Joyce, a Delta executive. The airline now claims to handle 99.9% of its customers' bags "perfectly". Other airlines are also incorporating RFID tags, and mobile scanners for baggage handlers.
But, in spite of these improvements, it seems that twenty-five million bags, out of 4.3 billion bags in total, still get misdirected or lost every year. Why is that? Nearly half of all bags that go astray do so because of problems with flight transfers, SITA says. Delayed flights have a ripple effect - your bag just doesn't make it to the connecting flight in time. And a significant proportion of missing bags result from passengers or handlers simply picking up the wrong one. Another contributory factor could be the complexity of the handling system. At some airports, airlines employ their own baggage handlers, but at others, the handlers are independent and contracted out to multiple airlines.
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) standard for encoding information about luggage dates from 1989. And the barcode label system has been updated in recent years. In some smaller airports however, even these labels are still not routinely scanned. Technology provider Zebra, for example, recently announced that it had supplied two hundred thirty mobile computers to baggage handlers at fourteen Greek airports just to enable them to scan bag label barcodes. "There would formerly have been a lot of pen and paper in place," says Zebra's Dean Porter. With many travelers going island-hopping, that sometimes led to lots of bags going astray. It's an experience passengers visiting small airports in Europe may also be familiar with. An overhaul is long overdue.
IATA brought in a new regulation called Resolution 753, aimed at making airlines and airports take better care of luggage entrusted to their care. Bags must now be checked as present and correct at several key points along the journey, explained Andrew Price, formerly IATA’s Head of Global Baggage Operations. The check points include when the bags are loaded onto the plane and when they enter the transfer system at connecting airports. IATA also supports the implementation of RFID tags throughout the industry, a move that could save it some $3 billion, even after taking into account the costs surrounding new equipment and monitoring systems. Trying to locate mislaid bags then ferrying them round to disgruntled customers costs a lot of time and money. "Considering that baggage is perceived as quite a dull area, there’s actually a massive amount of quite interesting technology and investment going on," explained Mr Price. Delta, for instance, has experimented with machine learning to spot lost luggage patterns and identify weak points in the system, such as particular destinations or bag types that are more problematic than others. Other recent innovations include airline apps that update customers on where their bags are at any given moment. While this doesn't necessarily affect how well the bag is handled, passengers appreciate having more information at their fingertips.
For their part, airlines have invested millions of dollars in technology over the last decade to give passengers the ability to track their baggage with apps in hopes of addressing the headache of lost luggage. But, luggage tracking technology is far from 100 per cent accurate. The weak link? People. “When it involves humans, you will always get errors,” said Peter Drummond, SITA Portfolio Director for Baggage. The bag-tracking technology varies by airline but all carriers rely on workers, at some point in the loading and unloading of luggage, to manually scan the luggage tags. The accuracy of the system can be degraded, experts say, if airline workers forget to scan a bag or if the luggage tag falls off. The overall rate of lost or mishandled luggage by all carriers has plummeted in the last decade, thanks to airline investments in new luggage sorting and tracking technology. Industry experts say the rate is likely to continue to drop as long as the tracking systems become more automated and less reliant on humans. Of course, you can always take matters into your own hands and track your luggage using a GPS or mobile network tag. This device sits inside your bag and broadcasts its location from anywhere in the world to the companion smartphone app. Makers include LugLoc, Trakdot, Tile and Smart Unit.
So what happens to luggage that's either lost or stolen rather than misdirected? Only 5% of mishandled bags fall into this category, says SITA. Any that end up in airport lost luggage departments are generally kept for a few months before being destroyed or sent on to auctioneers. "We've had all sorts, from dentures to artificial limbs," says Sam Ewing, associate director of BCVA, a Bristol, UK -based auction house."Everything you could possibly imagine you would take to go from A to B." In the US, the Unclaimed Baggage Center in Alabama offers unclaimed luggage for sale that it has bought from airlines. Its Web site boasts: "You never know what you'll find!"
If the airline industry finally gets its act together, such services may eventually no longer be needed.
Until next time...safe travels
Interesting post - seems like there is technology available but it is not being used as much as it might be - imagine being given a small discount if you can enter your "Tile" number onto the airline system so that everyone can track each item, should anything ever go wrong?