Virgin Australia is offering passengers the ability to track their luggage through a smartphone app, as airlines attempt to restore faith after a spate of lost and mishandled bags last year.
From this week, passengers flying with Virgin between Brisbane and Sydney were able to take advantage of a pilot of the bag tracking program.
By the middle of the year, the airline plans to expand the service to all flights between Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and the Gold Coast, with rollout to regional airports planned after that.
Guests flying on routes with the technology will have to download the airline’s smartphone app, and will receive a push notification when their luggage has been received post check-in, as well as when it arrives at their destination. Virgin plans to add more features to its luggage tracking offering later this year.
“For 23 years, Virgin Australia has consistently innovated and the introduction of bag tracking capabilities is another instalment of our award-winning product offering,” a Virgin Australia spokesperson said.
The carrier follows Air Zealand, which this week announced an expansion of the pilot of its luggage tracking program that began in April for select domestic flights. The service will now be offered to 25% of its app users on domestic flights and to 5% of users on short international flights including to Australia.
Virgin is the first Australian airline to offer baggage tracking.
The technological development comes after mishandled baggage rates soared last year as airlines returned to pre-Covid levels of operations.
Globally, there was a 24% increase in the mishandled bag rate – which measures checked luggage that is either lost or arrives at its destination delayed – to 4.35 bags per thousand passengers across global aviation in 2021, according to the industry data provider Sita.
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While 2022’s figures have not yet been released, mishandled rates for certain airlines soared above the 2021 global average as images emerged from airports of seas of lost luggage that short-staffed ground handlers were unable to sort through fast enough.
Amid the chaos, passengers began buying their own tracking devices such as Apple’s AirTags to follow their baggage. The trend led the German carrier Lufthansa to briefly ban such devices out of fears their batteries could spark a fire, though the airline quickly reversed this rule.
Qantas’s mishandled baggage rate has returned to its pre-pandemic normal of about five bags for each thousand passengers, significantly down from 12 bags for each thousand passengers it recorded last year.
This rate varied between airports, with Qantas denying claims from an outsourced ground handler at Sydney airport that during the peak of airport chaos, as many as one in 10 bags were being mishandled.
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