SITA‘s 2017 Baggage Report shows that, globally, airlines and airports are getting better at baggage handling efforts, with continuing improvements in Asia and North America offsetting a worse-than-last-year performance in Europe.

Using the “mishandled bag per 1,000 passengers” rate – the global figure of 5.73 represents a 12% improvement on last year. Over the same period the number of passengers has increased by 5.89% to 3.77 billion.

The regional breakdown however shows that airlines in Europe are significantly underperforming their global peers. In 2016, European airlines’ mishandling rate of 8.06 per 1,000 compares with 7.82 in 2015.

This poor performance is compounded by the fact that airlines in Asia and North America not only mishandle fewer bags but are continuing to improve – in 2016 Asia carriers mishandled only 1.81 bags per 1000 passengers, a small (2.3%) improvement on 2015. The 2016 figure from US airlines of 2.7 is “the best-ever”.

No explanation is given as to why European airlines are so out of synch, although the report notes that “using smart technologies has been one of the keys to success to [Asia-Pacific and North America]”

The regional breakdown comes at the end of the report, with SITA concentrating on the on-message topline finding of an overall global improvement. It offers a number of reasons, of which its own products feature prominently – more than 150 airports have BagManager installed, BagMessage sent more than three billion baggage service messages in 2016, WorldTracer is in use at over 2,800 airports.

Underpinning SITA and other baggage handling tech providers’ development roadmap is IATA’s Resolution 753 – due to come into effect in June 2018 and which, SITA says, “promises to deliver major improvements in baggage services over and above the incremental improvement of recent years.”

Resolution 753 means that IATA members – including those in Europe clearly – “must maintain an accurate inventory of baggage by monitoring the acquisition and delivery of baggage.”

As well as tech and Resolution 753, SITA also talks about “industry collaboration” as a reason for the overall improvement – specifically airports working more closely with airlines, and IATA and SITA baggage-related working groups bringing together competitive interests to talk about data sharing for the benefit of passengers.

The report doesn’t go into the importance of bags in terms of airline ancillaries – other studies such as the ongoing series from IdeaWorks – covers this in detail.

SITA says that “the (global) cost to the industry to recover and reunite [passengers] with their bag…was in the order of US$2.1 billion in 2016” although this doesn’t take into account the cost to brand reputation, loyalty or social media outrage.

And with SITA saying in the report that “82% of passengers surveyed in 2016 checked-in at least one bag for their last flight” it is evident that the demand from customers for checked-in baggage is strong.

The connection (no pun intended) between airlines selling checked-in baggage and the operational delivery of that service appears to be getting better on a global scale. But it is surprising that airlines in Europe, the region which normalised paying to put a bag in the hold, isn’t that great at getting that bag back to the passenger and is actually getting worse.

Click here for details on how to download the report.

NB: Image by BigStock.com