The Business of tourism...The dilemma of losing luggage

'For a visitor taking a vacation in the Caribbean, losing one's luggage can be a disaster, changing the nature of the holiday experience.'

David Jessop, Contributor

Delayed or lost luggage is a constant annoyance to frequent travellers in the Caribbean. Although detailed statistics are hard to come by at the regional level, anecdotal evidence and piles of luggage in some arrival halls suggest that short connection times, antiquated transfer systems at smaller airports and security-related delays account for a significant amount of inter-island luggage going missing.

mislaid luggage

Having said this, in many years of frequent travel in the region, across the Atlantic and in Europe and North America, my bags have not often been mislaid for more than three days.

For someone who has to travel regularly, this is unfortunate but normal. So much so that recently, having to make an unlikely series of connections travelling between Guadeloupe and Barbados on three airlines with changes in Martinique and St Lucia, the biggest surprise was that my bag arrived only one hour after I did.

disaster

However, for a visitor taking a vacation in the Caribbean, losing one's luggage can be a disaster, changing the nature of the holiday experience, causing problems for hoteliers whose staff are sometimes expected to try to help, and creating a sense of loss that rubs off on the usually blameless destination.

Recently, the issue of mislaid luggage was raised to the status of art with the opening of British Airways' new hi-tech terminal five at London's Heathrow Airport. Then, not only were transfer baggage and recently-checked items delayed for weeks in some cases, but much of it was sent by road to Milan for sorting so that the terminal's baggage handling systems could be made operational again.

According to the specialist baggage-tracking company, SITA, more than 42 million pieces of baggage were mishandled or delayed globally in 2007, an increase of 25 per cent on the previous year, costing airlines and airports an estimated $3.8 billion. The reasons in descending order of precedence were: mishandling when passengers transfer flights; failure to load baggage; ticketing error, and security-related delays.

new airport technology

In order to address this, new airport technology has been developed that involves directing, tracking and tracing passenger baggage using radio frequency identification (RFID). For the time being, airports and airlines remain cautious about the cost, but the providers of such technology expect the price to reduce and major airlines to start using this form of tagging soon.

As with so much else in the tourism business, this development represents a further investment challenge in a region that traditionally has been slow to embrace the technologies that most visitors come to expect in their home countries.

Who pays?

Once this system is commonplace with major airlines, national and regional carriers in the Caribbean and the airports from which they fly will have to find ways to pay for the adoption of RFID and other technologies. Innovation in tourism has become essential to retaining competitiveness but governments and the industry need to give earlier and more rapid consideration to who pays if the region is not to be left behind.