The tech aiming to prevent lost airline luggage

Image source, Jenny Loucas

Jenny Loucas knows that most of the clothes and jewellery she wore at her 40th birthday celebrations in Greece are gone.

After checking her luggage in for the flight back to London, it vanished.

She says she came back to a low after having a great time. I looked at some of the pictures and thought, "oh no, that was in the bag as well."

After two months, Easyjet confirmed that her luggage had been lost. "We are very sorry for the loss of Ms Loucas's bag, and we understand the frustration this will have caused," said an Easyjet spokeswoman.

As newspaper headlines and social media posts around the world have shown in recent months, Ms Loucas's case is not unique, with some commentators calling it the summer of lost luggage.

With many of these teams seeing layoffs during the Pandemic, they now can't cope with the demand to go on holiday again. Hundreds of missing suitcases have been found in warehouses.

There is no global estimate for the volume of delayed or lost luggage so far this year, but the problem has been there for a long time.

According to an annual report, 19 million bags and suitcases were late arriving around the world, and 1.3 million were never seen again. 5.6 items per 1,000 passengers were mishandled.

Many passengers are using technology to keep an eye on their luggage. They are attaching tracking devices to their luggage.

You can use your phone or computer to see where your suitcase is. A man who traveled from California to Scotland for a wedding had his luggage sent to Toronto, Canada, and then Detroit.

Ms Loucas said she would use the tags from now on. She wants something to stop her luggage from being lost again.

Eric Leopold, a travel industry expert, says that while such devices may give a passenger peace of mind, they don't solve the problem of bags not being able to catch the same flight as their owners.

When 99% of bags arrive on time and 1% are mishandled, but thousands of bags are stuck in London, the tags are not helping move the piles of bags.

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See True wants to help airports and airlines get luggage onto planes more efficiently. The software made by the Israeli firm can do security scans on luggage in less time than a human.

See True uses artificial intelligence and computer vision to find banned items in bags. It is able to detect in real-time, faster and more accurately than most humans, and never gets tired or distracted.

Baggage is delivered on time to the planes.

AirPortr wants to remove the need for passengers to queue up at the airport to check in their luggage before their flight.

Passengers can arrange for their luggage to be taken door to door using its app and website.

An AirPortr worker will pick up a suitcase from a person's home if they are on a British Airways or Swiss International Air Lines flight. The driver will take it to the departure airport's luggage area in the bowels of the terminal building for check-in.

One of AirPortr's transportation partners will pick up the suitcases at the airport and deliver them to the person.

If you don't mind your suitcase being picked up the day before you fly, fees start at around £40. If you want your luggage collected during a specific hour on the day, the price can be more than double. Further away from the airport, the cost increases.

The service doesn't add any flight emissions as bags travel on the same plane as the passenger, but it still means an extra car or van journey to the airport.

The chief executive of AirPortr set up the company in order to get baggage to travel in the same way as commercial aviation.

He hopes that by expanding the service around the world, it will eventually become a utility service used by all types of tourists.

AirPortr is more cost effective than handling passengers checking in their luggage at the airport, which is why airlines and airport operators will stop using it.

Passengers want airlines to hire more customer care workers.

Bill Doody, a British expatriate who lives in the French city of Toulouse, was one of the people whose suitcases were accidentally left in New York.

He said most of the numbers were dead. This was turned into a trip to remember for a lot of the wrong reasons.

Mr Doody had to wash his underwear in the hotel sink while he was in Australia for work.

We can't comment on specific lost baggage cases.

Ms Loucas is trying to get some money back. All my stuff has been lost. There was a lot of jewelry in that place. I must have lost between 1,500 and 2,000 dollars. I don't have receipts for everything.