Compared to many aspects of air travel, modernizing baggage handling seems, well, pretty ‘delayed.’ Am I the only person who is astounded at the fact that, as airport security has tightened so much when it comes to travelers and their water bottles, people can still just pull any bag off a carousel and walk out the door with it? Or that we let even inexperienced travelers attach their own sticky paper luggage tags, willy-nilly, and just drop them on a conveyor belt, along with thousands of other travelers’ bags, all going to different destinations on different flights… and hope for the best that they’ll show up at the same time and place we do?

It honestly seems like a miracle that baggage so often turns out right rather than wrong.

How Much Luggage Gets Lost?

We’ve all heard horror stories in recent years. COVID and its aftermath wreaked havoc on air travel operations. They were dark years for luggage ‘mishandling,’ as the industry calls bags that are damaged, delayed or temporarily or permanently lost.

Some airlines – and some airports – do better than others. But overall, according to the SITA Global Baggage report, just under 7 bags for every 1000 air travelers worldwide were mishandled in 2023. That’s less than 1% - and a big improvement over the previous (pandemic aftermath) year. Still, that represents over 36 million pieces of luggage – and the tiny fraction is cold comfort if your bag is one of those that goes missing.

Operations improvements and new technology are leading the way in the war against lost luggage.

The Grassroots Air Tag Revolution

Some advances have been driven by travelers themselves.

It didn’t take long for savvy travelers to adapt handy air tag technology to track their personal bags as they flew – despite early pushback from quite a few airlines and jurisdictions. Their concern was apparently the batteries, an unfounded one, as many advocates pointed out.

Not only did airlines quietly stop banning AirTags, but many have done a 180-degree turn. Now, about a couple of dozen airlines make air tag tracking an official part of their lost luggage process, allowing passengers to share the location of missing bags from their app with their airline to help locate and retrieve their bags.

Unpacking a New Era in Baggage Handling

And most recently, the airline industry as a whole has begun a united charge to revolutionize luggage.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has launched a 10-year “Global Baggage Roadmap” to modernize baggage operations around the world, with its member airlines, airports and industry partners all ‘weighing in’ on the best ways to make sure you and your bags reconnect no matter where and with whom you fly.

No surprise! IATA’s surveys show that:

81% of travelers want better tracking,
74% expect real-time updates on their mobile phones and
67% are willing to switch to electronic bag tags.

So IATA’s plan includes:

Baggage Information Standardization to harmonize how baggage information is shared among airlines, airports, and partners, replacing old legacy systems. This will even “significantly reduce the airline industry's annual spending of USD 1 billion on teletype messaging.” Teletype messaging? In 2025? Wow.
Real Time Baggage Tracking and Automation to provide visibility throughout the journey, using electronic baggage tags, GPS tracking, and robotics.
Streamlining the Baggage Claim Process and “enhancing the customer experience.” All those black bags, you don’t wonder how someone picks up the wrong one once in a while.

IATA thinks that within a decade, no matter where we fly around the world, our bags will be on a new, technology-driven journey right there with us.