The tenth annual SITA Baggage Report reveals that the rate of mishandled bags in 2013 was 6.96 bags per thousand passengers. This is just half the rate reported ten years ago, despite a telling 65.6% increase in passenger numbers over the same time period. From 2012 to 2013, the rate of mishandled bags dropped 21.2%, and the total annual cost of mishandled bags to the industry fell by 19.9%. Today, the annual cost of mishandled bags is 50% less than in 2007, when the number of mishandled bags peaked at 18.88 bags per thousand passengers. More impressive still is the fact that the industry has achieved this improvement even as passenger numbers rose more than 5% in 2013 to top 3bn passengers globally.
Francesco Violante, SITA's CEO, appraised the findings. "The industry has joined together to tackle the problem of mishandled bags, and we have seen great results. There is still more work to do, but 2013 was the best year ever, showing the benefits of this collaboration.
"As the community provider to the air transport industry, SITA continues to invest in innovative technologies to drive the mishandling rate still lower. This includes self-service solutions for passengers such as self-service bag-drops and our BagJourney application programming interface, which provides end-to-end baggage tracking for integration with airline and airport systems, such as smartphone and tablet apps."
In 2013, passengers reported 21.8m mishandled bags. More than 81% of these were delayed bags, with baggage transfers between flights cited as the leading cause. Although transfer bags remain a challenge for the industry, performance in this area continues to improve. In 2013, transfer bags accounted for 45% of delayed bags. This is 23.2% lower than the comparable figures for 2012. Improvement in transfer performance in recent years has been helped by greater messaging reliability, which enables bags with short connection times to be identified before they arrive at the airport. Better segregation of these hot bags in the aircraft and the adoption of smart mobile devices, such as tablets for key operational staff, have also played an important rôle.
