Missing luggage as travellers’ nightmare

It is one of travellers’ worst nightmares – being the last person at the airport conveyor belt and coming to that slow realisation that your bag isn’t coming, WOLE SHADARE writes

It is an awful experience when an airline loses a passenger’s luggage, and it happens to hundreds of passengers every single day.

Most “missing” bags are only delayed, as airlines have increasingly sophisticated systems of tracking them down and can usually do so within a few hours. Chances are, the bags simply got on the wrong flight.

One cannot but agree with this assertion as woleshadare.net witnessed passengers’ frustration when Arik Air, last week, failed to bring along London returnee travellers’ luggage to the Murtala Muhammed Airport, Lagos.

Save for the intervention of security operatives, the passengers almost took the law into their hands as they promised to unleash mayhem on officials of the airline.

The airline, through its spokesman, Banji Ola, gave reasons why passengers’ baggage on its Lagos – Heathrow, London was delayed for three days, citing use of a smaller aircraft on the route.

Ola said the carrier had to deploy a Boeing 737-800 aircraft on the route because its Airbus 330 -200 aircraft allocated to the route was undergoing maintenance.

Ola said the airline was constrained in capacity from the wide body aircraft to a narrow body airplane for the airline to leave passengers’ baggage behind.

According to Ola, “over the past three days, Arik Air has been using a smaller aircraft, a Boeing 737-800, to operate the Lagos-London, Heathrow route due to maintenance on the wide-body A330-200 aircraft allocated on the route.”

Missing luggage can prove either highly irritating or, bizarrely, kind of convenient.

If the airline loses your bag on the outbound flight, you’re left with only the clothes you’ve travelled in and might end up splashing extra money on last-minute T-shirts and toiletries to carry you through.

Research from SITA, the makers of the World Tracer System for baggage, found that there were 24.1 million mishandled (lost and temporarily mislaid) bags in 2014, a figure that translates as 7.3 bags per 1,000 passengers.

This figure is against the backdrop of ever-rising passenger numbers (3.3 billion in 2014) – since 2007 global passenger numbers have risen by a third, while the number of mis-handed bags has fallen by half, saving the industry $18 billion.

To reduce the incidents of lost baggage, major airlines use the World Tracer System, which tracks a bag for 100 days and uses the information provided about the appearance of the bag as well as the journey history to try to locate it.

Just recently, Delta deployed Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) baggage tracking technology across its system, including between Lagos Murtala Muhammed International Airport and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

The move will provide Nigerian customers with improved real-time tracking of luggage throughout the travel experience.The airline said the RFID would replace barcode hand scanning – the industry standard since the early 90s.

With this new technology, scanners use radio waves to capture highly accurate and consistent data stored on an RFID chip embedded in the luggage tag, driving superior tracking and increased transparency.

Commercial Manager for West and East Africa, Delta Air Lines, Bobby Bryan, said: “RFID is another example of our investment in the Nigerian marketplace.

It offers customers clear visibility of their checked bags and will set a new standard for more transparent, interactive tracking on the Fly Delta mobile app.”

“Delta’s daily non-stop flight between Lagos and Atlanta has gone from strength to strength and we continue to be focused on offering the best experience for our customers.”

A spokesperson for Virgin Atlantic explains: “When a customer identifies their bag as missing, a report is made into a system, which searches bags found with similar criteria. Bags found at an airport without a customer attached or missing a tag are also logged into this system with any details that can be established.

“The system works 24/7 searching for matches between the delayed bag reports the customer has made, and the found bag reports that the airline has made, and it makes suggestions for matches based on the criteria in the files.

“Our baggage-tracing team continuously looks at these matches, liaise with the airports and the customers, identify the right bag and owner, and facilitate the return of the bag.”

A spokesperson for British Airways said: “Usually we use continued tracing for a minimum of 90 days. Normally delayed bags travel on the next available flight, so in reality, it is very rare that we would still be tracing for that length of time.”

But, on the rare occasions that a bag is still lost where is it likely to end up? Surely, like lost socks from the washing machine, it must go somewhere?

If after 90 days no-one has been able to link you with your bag, it could end up like much of the other lost property that turns up in airports: at an auction house that sells on luggage, with profits going to charity.

Wole Shadare