Case study - Airline baggage tracking app
Design Case Brief:
A traveler has landed at New Delhi International Airport and needs to find her checked bag. Create a low-fidelity interaction flow that helps the traveler find her bag from her mobile app.
According to a recent survey by LocalCircles, in last 3 years in India, 35% of passengers reported that their luggage was lost or damaged. This issue of luggage, it going missing, most prominently has been at the center of aviation industry.
Although, many airlines are now trying to solve this issue using tech, not every airlines and airport have been friendly enough to make this happen due to transitioning cost of the new tech.
Let’s first understand how a bag’s journey at an airport looks like.
For a departing traveler -
- At the baggage drop point, the airline’s personnel fetches traveler’s itinerary, prints it out and attaches the tag to the baggage.
- This tag has information about the entire itinerary and also carries a unique barcode which is again unique to the particular traveler. This unique barcode has every bit of information about the itinerary as well as the traveler info
- Then the airliner agent takes this baggage to the take-away conveyor belt which further carries the baggage to Baggage Handling System. There are multiple barcode scanners around the conveyer to scan the tags and sort the baggage based on itinerary
- The baggage is sorted and sent to a Make-Up Point where an airliner loads the baggage onto carts and these carts are sent to the aircraft for loading
- Once the aircraft lands at destination airport, the baggage is unloaded in the carts and passed onto the appropriate baggage claim belt
Throughout this journey, the traveler has no visibility whatsoever of where their baggage is. And this opens a Pandora’s Box of several issues -
- Misplaced luggage — Different belt, different airport or aircraft than the destination
- Due to possible damage to the tag, airline agent can’t identify the destination aircraft and the baggage remains at the mark-up area
- A traveler has to look at the flight information displays to find out the belt number for claim
- Huge waiting times at the baggage claim area
- Someone else can pick up the luggage, resulting in theft
Although, the tags attached at the check-in/baggage drop enable the Airlines/ airport authorities to track the baggage at every point, potential damage to the tags can present a problem in tracking.
As of now, not every airline company shares this tracking information with the aggregators or travelers directly.
The issues discussed above has a huge impact on Airliners’ business -
- Out of the 28 million mishandled bags, 5% are lost each year. This means that there are 1.4 million lost luggage every year. This costs airliners a lot fortune
- For handling the grievances, huge resources are deployed resulting in more delay in normal baggage handling operations
- Bad customer reviews and damage to brand value
The Solution
In order to understand the user’s pain points and goals, let’s create a functional User Persona first.
Name: Boomer Bhavya
Age: 37 Years Old
Education: Under Graduate
Occupation: Business Development Officer
Goals: Track her check-in baggage throughout the journey, find her luggage easily and quickly after landing
As discussed above, some of the main causes of mishandled or lost baggage are -
- Damaged or lost Bar code tag
- Manual error
- No ability to track the location of the baggage
- Theft — someone else picking up the luggage from the baggage claim area
To address these pain points we can use Active RFID Tags that have numerous advantages over normal Barcodes as well as passive RFIDs. One of the major advantages of the Active RFIDs is that their location can be pinpointed on a given premise where the “Access Points” are installed.
Let’s look at some use cases and see how can we use these Active RFIDs —
Use Case 1: Bhavya drops her baggage at the check-in counter, airliner fetches her itinerary based on her tickets, prints a baggage tag and pushes the bag onto the Baggage Handling Conveyor System.
While loading, the tag gets ripped off and the barcode scanner in the handling system can’t identify the destination gate for the bag and while someone figures this out, flight has already taken off.
Solution: While checking-in the baggage at counter, the airliner agent scans an Active RFID Tag which associates this RFID Tag with the traveler, exclusively. Since the RFID tags can be read from any angle, they are not missed in the Baggage Handling System, as well as the tags are pretty safe from physical damage.
Use Case 2: Bhavya’s luggage makes it through the Baggage Handling system but due to a manual, human error, the luggage handling agent loads the luggage to a cart assigned to an aircraft of different destination and not New Delhi.
So, while Bhavya makes it to New Delhi airport, her luggage ends up in totally different city and she has no visibility whatsoever about what happened to her luggage and where is it.
Solution: When these RFID tags are made part of the Baggage handling System, different access points are installed at various locations in the airport including the Make-Up Area, different Gates, Loading belt which loads the luggage onto the aircraft.
And the Airport Information Display system is integrated with the RFID Baggage Handling System. So when Bhavya’s luggage reaches a different Gate than for a New Delhi flight’s gate, the RFID tag is read and a notification is sent to the Baggage Handline System agent as well to Bhavya, so that both become aware of the issue and the luggage can be retrieved and reconciled with New Delhi flight in-time.
Use Case 3: Bhavya and her luggage makes it to the New Delhi Airport. The ground staff offloads the luggage from the cargo and loads onto the Baggage Handling Cart heading for the Baggage Claim area. Due to some circumstances, there is a delay in Bhavya’s luggage being transported the claim area. Bhavya while waiting for luggage, get anxious and starts to worry about her luggage going missing or being stolen.
Solution: As soon as the Bhavya’s luggage is offloaded, the Access points at the gate read the RFID tag send a notification to Bhavya, informing her that her luggage is making its way to claim area. Also, it’s real-time location tracking details are also shared with Bhavya.
Use Case 4: As discussed in Use Case 2, there is a possibility that Bhavya’s luggage is places in a different aircraft other than one headed to New Delhi. In the worst case scenario, where despite the notifications, the airliner agent loads Bhavya’s luggage in a wrong aircraft.
Solution: The RFID tag is read before departure and a notification is sent to Bhavya at which gate her bag was scanned. If she misses this notification, upon landing in New Delhi, she can use the Baggage Tracking to see where her luggage is.
This Active RFID based Luggage Tracking product can be a stand-alone app in integration with Airliner’s system or it’s API can be integrated within the airliner’s own app.
Following are the wireframes to illustrate some of the solutions we discussed so far —
We can also use WhatsApp Messages to push the notification to user.
Thank you (:
