People have a lot of complaints about air travel these days, but one of the biggest is lost luggage. There’s nothing quite as frustrating as arriving at your destination only to discover that your bags didn’t arrive with you. Passengers feel like the airlines don’t care, but actually they care a great deal because lost bags means lost money. Airlines spend $100 on average per mishandled bag, for tracking, shipping, and reimbursing passengers.
German carrier Deutsche Lufthansa AG handles some 100,000 bags each day at Frankfurt Airport, and 80 percent of them have to change planes, which is when bags are most likely to go astray. Lufthansa and Fraport AG, owner of the Frankfurt Airport, decided it was time to seriously attack the problem. An important aspect of better baggage handling is using the bar codes on check-in tags, but most airlines and airports have computer systems that don’t communicate with one another. Lufthansa and Fraport linked their computers and tied them to a system that helps track bags and decide what to do with them. Employees use scanners to register every bag or container going on or off a plane. The bags are
scanned again as they enter the airport’s automated sorting system, and they are repeatedly scanned by the system to decide where they should be sent. The system really pays off for bags making tight flight connections. Two employees,
each with six computer screens, continually monitor arrival and departure data of passengers who have little time between connecting flights. Decision support software scans through hundreds of thousands of reservations and real-time air-traffic data to spot potential problems and identify “hot bags,” those that are prone to a missed connection. The
employees can then flag the bags and notify baggage loaders to quickly get them off the incoming flight and on to the next one