SITA and Lufthansa have joined forces to discover methods to scale back mishandled baggage prices and enhance the passenger expertise by digitally automating baggage re-flight operations. Mishandled baggage between two flight connections is a significant ache level for the business, costing it billions of {dollars} every year.
The capacity to handle the difficulty of workers shortages and baggage mishandling is of paramount significance post-pandemic. Aviation misplaced round 2.3 million jobs throughout COVID, whereas recording US$2.2 billion in the price of mishandled baggage in 2022 – together with over 4 million luggage mishandled throughout switch.
SITA’s WorldTracer Auto Reflight reflights luggage digitally, with none human intervention, decreasing price and inconvenience whereas contributing to business efforts in the direction of sustainability and CO2 net-zero targets. With the profitable supply of baggage being a prime contributor to the passenger expertise, it’s crucial to reply effectively, protecting passengers knowledgeable and in management when issues go flawed. SITA’s auto reflight resolution proactively notifies passengers on arrival of any delay with their bag, whereas accumulating supply particulars and in the end permitting the passenger to bypass the luggage corridor.
The resolution robotically suggests an acceptable flight routing for rush luggage (baggage not accompanying a passenger). It makes use of the unique bag tag to reflight and informs the luggage system of the brand new bag routing. Time is saved, and paper consumption is diminished, as a result of there isn’t any have to challenge further rush tags. SITA estimates that widespread automation of reflighting baggage might save the business US$30 million a 12 months in prices related to mishandled baggage.
Viktoria Rudo, Senior Manager, Lufthansa Group, mentioned: “At Lufthansa, we’ve got at all times checked out methods to optimize baggage administration processes and enhance the passenger journey. We see nice potential within the automation of at this time’s primarily handbook reflighting processes. This is why we’ve got determined to work with SITA to discover potentialities to digitalize the method.
“Based on the first results of our Proof of Concept, we believe to be able to automatically reflight as much as 70% of Lufthansa´s mishandled bags at Munich Airport. Interpolating this to our global network, we expect more up-to-date information and further improvements in the mishandled baggage processes for Lufthansa and high potential for other SITA airline customers by digitalizing what was previously a totally manual process.”
After a lot of joint developments with Lufthansa already (together with WorldTracer Desktop and WorldTracer Passenger Self Services), the SITA automated baggage reflighting resolution represents a joint innovation mission to additional automate and optimize Lufthansa’s Baggage Management Services.
Sergio Colella, SITA President for Europe, mentioned: “SITA’s automated baggage reflighting solution is built on the back of past successful co-innovations with Lufthansa and meets a critical industry baggage management requirement as we see the return to the skies. Our aim to make sure that when a bag is mishandled, it is reunited with its owner as soon and simply as possible.”
