New Technologies?

[ImPlaneCrazy]

I was recently reading an article around a new type of baggage tag that Delta are trialing. It uses a small chip in the baggage tag + specific scanners to track the bag throughout its journey, and provides updates to the passenger on the bag status - even when the bag is loaded!

It got me thinking - is this really what passengers want? Surely there must be a better use of technology that can benefit passengers & airlines more than this?

[DaveReidUK]

The benefits to passengers are just a by-product. The benefits to airlines from fewer lost bags should be obvious.

[Piltdown Man]

All of our baggage tags have RF chips but the system to use them has not been installed. The idea is to track each and every bag from check-in to destination. It will be good when it happens but will this information be shared with passengers? Flying passengers when they know their bags or not onboard might be difficult.

There was also a plan to check passengers in the same way but smartphones got in the way. You can read a boarding pass with an RF chip quite easily but you can't track a phone that is turned off.

[chrissw]

While I was on holiday in Australia recently, I noticed that quite a lot of Qantas passengers had a round Qantas tag on their bags with a barcode on it. Is this something similar, i.e. with a chip in it, or is it just a barcode which has to be read at every stage of the journey?

[PAXboy]

Yes - it's called the Q-tag and you can find it on the QF website. As Piltdown Man says, the plan was for chipped boarding passes to replace the 'ATB' card but smartphones and the desire to save more money by having the pax print their pass/Smartphone pass took over very rapidly.

There are a number of companies now selling RFID and BlueTooth bag tags for the Pax but the e-tag is only really helpful to a carrier with a large domestic network - like Australia and the USA. Only then is it worth investing in auto tag readers at the airports. As always, it's the cost.