20 airlines sign up to use SITA’s technology in just six months

Geneva | June 19, 2018– Global air transport IT provider SITA has announced that its technology, BagJourney, is managing baggage for an increasing number of the world’s airlines. In the first six months of this year alone, more than 20 airlines have chosen the solution. SITA BagJourney is one of the key technologies helping the industry meet the IATA Resolution 753 requirement to track every stage of every bag’s journey.

To meet the conditions of Resolution 753, airlines must track every item of baggage at four key points in the journey: at check-in, loading onto the aircraft, transfer and arrival. The biggest challenge airlines and airports face doing this is scanning at the point of transfer and on arrival. Typically, these were not areas of the airport where scanning was done so they require attention and new infrastructure.

With a growing number of customers, SITA’s baggage management technology is firmly established as the solution of choice for the air transport industry. Together, SITA’s BagJourney customers handle hundreds of millions of bags each year and these airlines are enjoying as much as 30% reduction in the rates of mishandling.

Peter Drummond, Director, Baggage Solutions, SITA, said: “IATA’s resolution has brought a sharp focus on the potential for further improvements in baggage management. We at SITA have taken up the challenge and are helping airlines and airports quickly and effectively meet the new tracking requirements.  Working with our industry partners, we have developed new economical infrastructure enhancements for BagJourney.

“These offer the choice of handheld devices for scanning or scanning arches that are quick to install. Each airline and airport has different needs so we have ensured that the various hardware options are easily integrated into our BagJourney solution for fast implementation.”

John Fowler, Senior Director with responsibility for Customer Service, BahamasAir, said: “SITA gave us several options for improving our baggage tracking. Within just seven days we moved from manual ‘bingo card’ tallies to using handheld devices to track all bags at our two busiest baggage destinations, Nassau and Miami. After six months of tracking bags on our busiest route, we observed a 60% drop in the amount of claims due to baggage mishandling.

“We now plan to implement the new technology at all our stations using a phased approach. We will have it in place at the majority of destinations we fly to and hope to reach 100% Resolution 753 compliance by the end of the year. The ease of integration of the hardware and the sophisticated BagJourney solution is the key to success.”

SITA has been the recognized leader in bag tracking and tracing for more than 25 years with its systems in every major airport in the world. SITA BagJourney is the world’s first community-based baggage tracking system that provides an end-to-end view of the baggage journey using data from multiple sources. Today, SITA is leading the baggage community by providing technology and professional services to help airlines track baggage and unlock the value of the vast amounts of tracking data that will be produced.

SITA is hosting ‘Tracking Bags – A Turning Point in 2018’ today, June 19^th. This webinar features speakers from American Airlines and IATA, who together will discuss the latest trends and industry IT practices in baggage tracking. Places are limited, register now.

Airline industry improves baggage handling further as industry readies for June 2018 deadline

Geneva | May 4, 2017– Baggage management by the world’s airlines improved again in 2016 as the industry focuses on technology investments and prepares for a step-change in handling by June 2018. According to the SITA Baggage Report 2017, released today, the rate of mishandled bags was 5.73 bags per thousand passengers in 2016, down 12.25% from the previous year and the lowest ever recorded.

This is good news for the rising number of passengers, which last year hit an all-time high of 3.77 billion. Since 2007, the rate of mishandled baggage has fallen 70% due to investment in technologies and process improvements by the world’s airlines and airports. Over the coming 18 months, this is expected to improve even further. IATA members, the majority of the world’s airlines, have adopted a resolution requiring every piece of checked baggage to be tracked along its journey by June 2018.

Ilya Gutlin, SITA President, Air Travel Solutions, said: “It is frustrating for passengers and airlines when bags go missing but the days of not knowing where your bag is will soon to be a thing of the past. We are on the brink of a new era in airline baggage management because the world’s airlines are committing to track baggage throughout its journey. This requires data capture, management and sharing across airlines, airports and ground handlers giving a better view of where each piece of luggage is at every stage. At SITA we are providing several tracking innovations that will allow the air transport community to scale up their tracking capabilities without massive capital investments.”

The IATA Resolution 753 is coming into force in June 2018 and from then every bag must be tracked and recorded at four mandatory points – at check-in; aircraft loading; at transfer between carriers; and on arrival as the bag is delivered back to the passenger. When this is in place airlines will be able to share the information with their passengers and code share partners allowing them to track their bag, just like a parcel. Having this information means passengers will stay informed and all parties involved in their journey can take action if flights are disrupted and their bags are delayed.

A critical pinch-point in the bag handling process is when passengers and their luggage need to move from one aircraft to another, or from one carrier to another. Bags have a higher risk of being mishandled at this time, particularly if connections are tight. In 2016, close to half (47%) of delayed bags were in the process of being transferred. Introducing mandatory tracking at this point of the process will provide real-time data that can be used to avoid delays.

Mishandled baggage negatively affects both the passenger experience and the airline’s finances and SITA’s report shows that the financial costs remain high despite the 12.25% drop in the mishandled rate. SITA reports that the global bill for recovering and reuniting passengers with their bags was in the order of US$2.1 billion in 2016.

Gutlin added: “We are using technology to transform baggage management which will improve both the passenger experience and help to reduce the cost to the airlines. To be successful we need to cooperate and collaborate across the industry and challenge ourselves to find new ways of working and sharing data to upgrade the experience for air travelers and to improve operations.”

SITA provides IT and communications to the air transport industry and is the only single-source vendor covering all areas of baggage management from data capture to management and sharing using the latest technology. SITA has been the recognized leader in bag tracking and tracing for over 20 years with its systems in every major airport in the world. SITA WorldTracer is sponsored by IATA as the industry baggage tracing service of choice. SITA BagJourney is the world’s first community-based baggage tracking system that provides an end-to-end view of the baggage journey using data from multiple sources. Today SITA is leading the baggage community by providing technology and professional services to help the industry meet the IATA June 2018 deadline.

• Global IT provider helps airlines and airports to make sense of 2.5 billion bag messages

Passenger Terminal EXPO, Paris | March 10, 2015– Accurate information on the current location of passengers’ baggage is now available to airlines and airports with SITA’s BagJourney. SITA has harnessed the 2.5 billion data messages, which it manages for the global airline and airport community in its BagMessage service, to provide smart solutions that allow bags to be tracked like parcels.

Every day airlines and airports exchange information on the location of passengers’ baggage. SITA’s BagMessage is the global, fully-managed and secure message distribution service that is used by more than 220 airports and 500 airlines around the world to do this. The volume of data managed by SITA is growing fast, at close to 20% per year, and has now reached an annual volume of 2.5 billion messages. SITA has focused its attention on this huge volume to provide efficient and valuable services to airlines and airports to improve the management of baggage across the world and to meet the expectation that airline baggage should be as easy to track as a parcel sent by the world’s courier companies.

Speaking at the Passenger Terminal Expo, Nick Gates, SITA Portfolio Director, Baggage, said: “An immense amount of data is created about baggage and we have worked hard to design solutions to use these billions of messages and provide value to the air transport community.

“SITA BagJourney follows the bag, from check-in to final delivery, through multiple airports and multiple airlines. We at SITA have now made it possible to track airline baggage just like a parcel. We are delivering this service to our community via an application programming interface (API) to allow airlines and airports to integrate it into to their existing systems quickly and easily, including services such as mobile updates which they might offer to passengers.”

Keeping track of passengers’ bags is a priority for the air transport industry but it will become even more important in the coming years, as airlines and airports prepare to implement IATA’s new resolution 753. This resolution, which comes into effect in 2018, requires IATA member airlines to monitor and log the status of its passengers’ bags through the major stages of the bags’ journey. One of the biggest consequences will be that inbound (arrival bags) will need to be more actively tracked/monitored.

Andrew Price, Head of Airport Operations Management, IATA, said: “IATA continues to drive improvements in baggage handling and we welcome solutions, like SITA’s BagJourney, that will help airlines to comply with Resolution 753. What is clear is that, if airlines can use baggage data efficiently they will see results. When one major airline introduced 100% tracking they saw a 35% reduction in mishandling, so there will be a combination of savings and improvements in the passenger experience.”

SITA’s baggage tracking offering is unique because BagJourney is integrated with WorldTracer – the only truly global tracing and matching service of delayed bags. This allows a bag’s journey to continue to be tracked even if it is mishandled.

Gates added: “Since BagJourney’s development, more and more applications for tracking and analysis have surfaced through discussions with our customers including; disruption management apps; mishandled information to crew while in-flight; mishandling charges proration and validation; and more. We at SITA expect our customers of BagMessage to be able to derive substantial benefits from using BagJourney because SITA delivers their baggage information worldwide.”

Smart Technology for Efficient Baggage Management

SITA is demonstrating its smart technology at Passenger Terminal Expo, an international airport conference and exhibition that attracts more than 3,500 visitors from more than 90 countries. At stand 2050 visitors can see SITA’s new smart mobile solutions for reconciliation from tracking to tracing that make use of the 2.5 billion bag messages that the air transport community creates and exchanges each year.