Delta’s announcement of its rollout of RFID for passenger baggage handling is aimed squarely at improving the customer experience of its travelers. Delta aims to reliably deliver every bag on every flight. By providing customers with improved real-time tracking of luggage throughout the travel experience, it will provide peace of mind, convenience, and dramatically reduces one of the key aggravations of flying – the lost or misplaced bag.
Delta handles 120 million bags annually. With RFID, customers will see their bags loaded on and off aircraft during their journey via the Fly Delta mobile app beginning in the Q4 2016.
For customers, RFID means much more than just consistent baggage handling. In the same way customers want information at their fingertips about flight changes, customers want clear visibility to their checked bags, according to Tim Mapes, Delta’s Chief Marketing Officer. RFID will soon be used to track bags on all Delta mainline and Delta Connection flights.
Today, when a customer misses a connection, agents on the ground manually scan each bag to find the customer’s luggage and ensure it is retagged for the new flight. With RFID, agents have the ability to quickly take inventory and pinpoint a single bag, improving the speed of reconnecting passengers with their luggage. Luggage is rarely lost, the reality is that when it is misrouted, it is just somewhere inconvenient.
Better baggage handling processes and technology have already reduced the airline’s mishandled bag rates by 68 percent over the past 10 years, establishing Delta as the leading U.S.-based global airline for baggage performance. RFID will take their service to a whole new level, further distinguishing Delta from its competition. And RFID is the technology to reunite travelers with their wayward bags faster than any other system in the market.