Passport, money, AirTag? Why luggage woes are back
After returning to New York from Oslo in late May, Harley Hendrix noticed her suitcase containing a cherished Alexander McQueen dress had been diverted to Copenhagen. Also rotting in Denmark: packs of cheese that Hendrix had stuffed into the suitcase to bring back home. While she hadn’t visited Copenhagen, Hendrix knew the bag was there because, like many people these days, she had tucked an AirTag inside. Delta first told her it was at John F. Kennedy International, then Dallas. But the tracker was pinging from Denmark. It took a week for Delta and its European partner KLM to find the suitcase and forward it to New York. A year after air travel stormed back from pandemic lows, overwhelming the system with airport chaos and luggage pileups, airlines are still struggling to keep up. Just last month, bags stacked up from Newark Liberty to Los Angeles International after storms scrambled airline schedules in the northeast US. At Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, some 10,000 bags were lost in one day, which KLM CEO Marjan Rintel blamed on the hub’s outdated systems. Passengers are meanwhile arming themselves with Bluetooth devices in ever greater numbers, exposing a balky bag-handling system that’s often a step behind customers – and putting pressure on the industry to catch up. Airlines and baggage-handling firms say they’re better equipped than last year to keep customers’ goods from getting lost. The industry is also working on a plan to incorporate the trackers into existing systems, and seeking assistance from technology firms. One challenge is to create a standard for interoperability between airlines and device manufacturers – a starting point for eventual solutions. “There is a huge benefit in complementing the airlines’ tracking data with the Bluetooth tracker information,” said Getnet Taye, senior manager of global baggage operations at the IATA, the industry’s main lobbying group. Current bag-handling tech is largely bar-code based, logging items intermittently on their journey but not continuously. <br/>
https://portal.staralliance.com/cms/news/hot-topics/2023-07-17/general/passport-money-airtag-why-luggage-woes-are-back
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Passport, money, AirTag? Why luggage woes are back
After returning to New York from Oslo in late May, Harley Hendrix noticed her suitcase containing a cherished Alexander McQueen dress had been diverted to Copenhagen. Also rotting in Denmark: packs of cheese that Hendrix had stuffed into the suitcase to bring back home. While she hadn’t visited Copenhagen, Hendrix knew the bag was there because, like many people these days, she had tucked an AirTag inside. Delta first told her it was at John F. Kennedy International, then Dallas. But the tracker was pinging from Denmark. It took a week for Delta and its European partner KLM to find the suitcase and forward it to New York. A year after air travel stormed back from pandemic lows, overwhelming the system with airport chaos and luggage pileups, airlines are still struggling to keep up. Just last month, bags stacked up from Newark Liberty to Los Angeles International after storms scrambled airline schedules in the northeast US. At Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, some 10,000 bags were lost in one day, which KLM CEO Marjan Rintel blamed on the hub’s outdated systems. Passengers are meanwhile arming themselves with Bluetooth devices in ever greater numbers, exposing a balky bag-handling system that’s often a step behind customers – and putting pressure on the industry to catch up. Airlines and baggage-handling firms say they’re better equipped than last year to keep customers’ goods from getting lost. The industry is also working on a plan to incorporate the trackers into existing systems, and seeking assistance from technology firms. One challenge is to create a standard for interoperability between airlines and device manufacturers – a starting point for eventual solutions. “There is a huge benefit in complementing the airlines’ tracking data with the Bluetooth tracker information,” said Getnet Taye, senior manager of global baggage operations at the IATA, the industry’s main lobbying group. Current bag-handling tech is largely bar-code based, logging items intermittently on their journey but not continuously. <br/>
