Steve Rogerson discovers that his problem with a lost suitcase after Embedded World is part of a much wider issue affecting the transport industry.

Reading – and writing – about the various track-and-trace capabilities that the IoT in its different forms has enabled, one could be forgiven for thinking that nothing gets lost any more. Especially in an airport where items are tracked from check-in to destination.

The sheer wrongness of that impression hit me hard last month when I travelled to and from Embedded World in Nuremberg. The minor annoyance on my outward journey when my bag failed to change planes along with me at Frankfurt (minor because Lufthansa managed to reunite me with the bag within a few short hours) was nothing compared with British Airways abysmal performance on the way home.

Lufthansa switched me to BA due to delays with its own planes and this journey involved me changing at Heathrow to reach Manchester. Now, my UK readers will have probably seen the horror stories in the newspapers about the piles of unclaimed luggage building up at Heathrow not to mention the smell as food stored in those suitcases starts to go off.

I had no food in my case, which was just as well because it would be another two weeks before I would see it again. I filled in my lost luggage form at Manchester and was told I would get an email confirmation with my tracking details within the hour. That did not arrive. I rang up the next morning and eventually got the details on how to check the progress of the search.

Despite BA having my email address and phone number, I never got a single message from them, even when the airline located the bag nearly two weeks later. Everything was proactive by me, going on to the site and checking what was happening.

I discussed this later with a nice man called Gareth from the BA press office, who insisted my lost bag was not a technology issue, but due to massive luggage belt problems at Heathrow. He said normally it takes 24 to 48 hours for people to get lost bags back. He didn’t know why I received no messages.

I asked him what sort of technology was used to track the bags and was quite disappointed to find a lack of wireless tracking or any modern IoT method we all know. Apparently, it relies on a human being scanning the barcode tag on the luggage at each point in its journey. Surely that therefore meant they knew my luggage was at Heathrow. Well, yes and no.

“We don’t want to say it is at Heathrow until we know where at Heathrow it is,” said Gareth.

They are a bit scared of hordes of angry travellers descending on the airport demanding to search for their bags themselves.

The problem is a lot larger than just my bag. According to airline body Sita (Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautiques), the global mishandled baggage rate surged 24% last year to 4.35 bags per thousand. With the massive increase in air travel this year combined with staff shortages as airlines reopen after the Covid layoffs, the situation has just got worse, incredibly so. And Sita thinks it is time the airlines did something about it.

“The industry now needs to do more with less,” said David Lavorel, CEO of Sita. “As we emerge from the pandemic, our customers’ focus remains on safely managing the end-to-end transport of passengers’ baggage, but now they must also reduce the total cost and training required. There is significant pressure to increase operational efficiency, which is accelerating digitalisation.”

Digitalisation. That is what is needed, and Sita points out that most airports and airlines are looking at touchless bag tagging options though most of that seems centred around self-check-in. It is though now using the likes of computer vision and machine learning to bring this all up to speed.

There must be opportunities for some IoT companies to get a good slice of this business, but I suspect none of this will happen in time for my next dealings with BA at Heathrow when I take a trip to Chicago towards the end of August. However, I should be comforted by the knowledge that this is a direct flight; according to Sita, the number of bags being delayed at transfers has gone up 41%.

Nevertheless, I am still dreading the moment my bag disappears into the system at check-in and wondering when, if ever, I will see it again. I will let you know what happens.