Lost luggage continues to be an issue for travellers and that’s why the International Air Transport Association recently introduced two resolutions to help fix the problem.
For her MSc thesis, Industrial Design Engineering student Myrthe Lemmen studied how officials at KLM are adopting an innovative system to adhere to these new requirements.
The company is currently in the process of designing Follow My Baggage, an app that will allow passengers to keep track of their luggage in real time during their journey. This will help both KLM’s employees and their customers remotely monitor these items and, hopefully, prevent them from going astray.
Lemmen spent six months on the project and conducted both academic and field research. She spoke with several individuals who work in the airline industry in addition to others.
“I interviewed a lot of KLM employees, a few at Schiphol and a representative from Delta Airlines” Lemmen said. “I wanted to include as many perspectives as possible. Furthermore, I interviewed passengers wandering around near the gates at Schiphol.”
Lemmen asked them about their recent travel experiences in order to devise further features for KLM’s new system. In addition to including these proposals in her thesis, she submitted them to officials at the company as well.
“I proposed some recommendations, especially for the communication of incoming and mishandled baggage,” she said. “I recommended that passengers can request the information about their baggage being in their plane only after landing. That would give KLM the opportunity to think of a solution for the delayed bag and reassure the passenger.”
Lemmen’s other ideas included adding features to the app to make it easier for passengers to report missing items and adding alerts that will provide an estimate of when their luggage will arrive in baggage claim areas. She also thinks that KLM should design similar ‘offline’ options for fliers who don’t have Wi-Fi or smartphones to keep tabs on their bags.
KLM officials are eager to get the system up and running as soon as possible. Currently, about 24 out of every 1,000 of their customers report mishandled bags. The company hopes to lower this number to 20 or fewer by 2020.
Lemmen, M.L., Time Flies … When Your Bag Was in the Skies!: Designing Individual Tracking Events for Incoming Baggage and its Applications Towards the Passenger and KLM, PhD supervisors R. Van Heur and J. De Koning, Defence: March, 4, 2016.
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