FirstBag Product Launch

Most airlines misconnect between two and 50 items of luggage per thousand, incurring huge annual repatriation costs in the process.  Add in the cost of an individual’s below-par travel experience and you can see why airlines want to get it right first time.

Perfect baggage reconciliation and management would mean every item of luggage found its way, on time, to the correct container and onto the right aircraft.  And while much progress has been made on this front over the past five years with a number of baggage reconciliation systems (BRS) hitting the market, the only one that boasts real-time visibility through an Internet-based software application is Zafire Aviation’s FirstBag. With this system airlines are able to monitor every item of baggage at all airports around the world at the click of a button.

Chris Beling is Zafire’s director of operations: “A number of airports don’t use BRS because they regard it as expensive. Yet if an airline is spending well over a million dollars a year on repatriating bags, and if FirstBag can prevent 50 percent of those repatriations at 10 percent of the cost, it means great savings for the airline and improved confidence for passengers. Not only does it pay for itself, it’s also very simple. Once a bag is checked in and arrives down a chute, Zafire provides handlers with handheld computers that scan the bags and tell the operator exactly which container to load the bag into. If they try and load a bag into the wrong container, a warning will tell them not to. In this way we can simply minimize human error.”

Guaranteed to improve the performance and efficiency of the baggage handling operation at every airport, the benefits of FirstBag are manifold: reducing cost through less repatriation and fewer baggage claims; fewer flight delays since bags can be pinpointed and rapidly pulled from an aircraft; improved efficiency through better use of staff; enhanced bag security through alerting baggage handlers to a passenger’s change in status; and full baggage visibility that at any time can be shared between ground handlers, airline load planners and airport authorities.

Already in use at Schiphol and Los Angeles airports, and validated by over a dozen international carriers, this simple-to-use browser-based technology is genuinely flexible and can be easily deployed and customised.  What is more, it is ‘future-proof’.  “When RFID technology is ready, we’ll be waiting. It makes no difference to our software – all we need is the right information,” maintains a confident Beling.