Back to Air Transport IT Review - Issue 2, September 2010
Baggage improvement: fact or fiction?
The airline industry has had little good news to shout about over the last year but one silver lining has been the dramatic improvement in mishandled baggage, which cost the industry $3.8 billion in 2007.
In the three years since, the baggage mishandling rate has fallen 40% from 18.86 for every 1000 passengers to 11.38, saving the industry $1.3 billion in the process.
Further good news on baggage came in the SITA/ATW Passenger Self-service Survey which revealed that waiting for checked luggage on arrival had dropped from second to fourth as the step of the journey passengers would most like to change to make their trip more enjoyable.
"Passengers seem to be less concerned that their bags are going to go astray," says Nick Gates, Director of Baggage Portfolio, SITA.
Work to be done
That's good news for Andrew Price. As the Assistant Director of IATA's Baggage Improvement Programme, he and his team are providing the industry with solutions that, when implemented, have the potential to bring mishandling rates down to 9.43/1000 by 2012.
And while the steep fall in the headline number is welcome, he recognizes there is still a lot of work to be done. "Despite the improvement since 2007, baggage mishandling remains a major problem, particularly in the US, Europe and Latin America."
So how is he tackling it? "We can only get to around 20 airports a year, so we choose the ones that account for the highest mishandling. At most of the airports we manage to identify 90% of the issues and can recommend solutions for around 75% of them," explains Price.
Daunting
Those solutions depend heavily on what he calls "common sense - simple stuff" contained in IATA's Baggage Improvement Toolkit. The toolkit contains 67 solutions to mishandling issues from low tech ones like extra training for check-in agents and painting lines on the floor, all the way through to high tech solutions such as RFID track and trace.
Nevertheless, with IATA members flying to 4,500 airports worldwide the size of the task is daunting, so Price and his team of two have put in place a self-help kit based around the toolkit so that airports can be more proactive themselves in dealing with baggage mishandling.
Price has undoubtedly been helped in his work by the economic crisis. Passenger traffic fell 4% in 2009, so there were fewer people travelling and those that were travelling were checking in less luggage. "It used to be 82% of passengers checking in bags but that is now down to 76%," says Gates.
There seems to be a number of reasons for this dramatic drop in check-in baggage with the most significant being what Price terms "the commercialization of baggage". For example, US airlines collected over $2.5 billion in baggage fees last year.
Self-service
There are also self-service initiatives such as web and kiosks check-in that have made travelling through the airport much easier if you only have hand luggage. This may have persuaded some passengers to make fuller use of their hand luggage entitlement and cut out checked baggage.
The true test of Price's work will be when passenger numbers start to increase above pre-recession levels. That is already happening. Passenger traffic is up 7% so far this year, but by May there had only been a 2% rise in the number of mishandled baggage claims filed.
Both Gates and Price are confident that this lower increase is due in large part to the baggage improvement efforts made by the industry over the last few years. "I would not expect us to return to the levels of 18-19 bags per 1000 we saw in 2007," asserts Gates. That's good news for packrats everywhere.
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