Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw wants a ‘technology fix’ for baggage chaos at airports

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw tweeted,”Mega mismanagement of baggage handling at US, UK and European airports is seeing irate passengers landing without their checked in baggage. IATA needs to do a root cause analysis which I guess is due to shortage of baggage handlers. Is there not a technology fix??”

According to a report by Spanish insurer Mapfre SA,the number of travelers reporting stranded luggage this summer jumped 30% from 2019. More bags are going missing as short-staffed airports and airlines struggle to keep up with luggage handling alongside surging travel demand. Most stranded luggage ends up resurfacing, thus not triggering reimbursement, the insurer said.

Many passengers have missed their transfer flights or were forced to leave their belongings behind. KLM, who handles some of the luggage at Amsterdam Schiphol, says a backlog of several thousand stranded bags has finally been whittled down to the hundreds. But the problem remains widespread across the region.

London’s Heathrow, once considered a gateway to Europe, recently asked airlines to cap ticket sales in order to limit daily passengers through September. Last week, Delta Air Lines Inc. also deployed a wide-body plane without passengers to collect 1,000 stranded bags.

A British Airways Plc passenger wrote on Twitter this week that her tracker showed her luggage arrived in London Heathrow a day after her flight and has been there for more than 10 days. Last month, a Singapore Airlines Ltd. passenger used his AirTag to locate and collect his bags after they’d been stuck in Melbourne Airport for a week, the Daily Mail reported.

*With inputs from agencies

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