Surfer dudes and dudettes take note: United Airlines has dropped the fees it charges to check your surfboard – if you’re flying direct to or from California.
Noting that surfing was recently named California’s official state sport, United Airlines is no longer charging surfers traveling to or from California (only) a $150 or $200 special fee to check surfboards, wakeboards or paddleboards.
Instead, only the regular checked bag fees will apply.
United’s new policy only applies to direct flights into or out of the Golden State.
As California’s global airline, we knew what we had to do when surfing was named the state sport: waive the service fees for surfboards, on all flights, to or from California. #Stoked 🏄♀️🏄🤙
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines has added an augmented reality bag sizer tool to its app to help passengers figure out if their carry-on bags comply with the airline’s rules.
The augmented reality bag check tool shows a virtual KLM suitcase that is the size of a carry-on bag that fits the dimensions of the bags KLM allows on board.
When the user points their phone at their own carry-on bag, the augmented reality tool can measure the bag against the sample bag.
Here’s a video that shows how the tool works.
While it seems that many passengers ignore most airlines’ rules about the dimensions of carry-on bags allowed, the augmented reality tool seems like a great way for resposible travelres to comply with the rules.
This also seems like a good way to avoid arguments at the gate when KLM gate staffers are being sticklers about enforcing the rules.
If it works well, this is a tool every airline could add to their app.
Passengers could use it to measure their bag before they leave home. In the boarding area, gate agents who feel a bag is oversized could just aim their version of the app at a bag. If there’s debate, both passenger and gate agent could take a screen shot of the results.
Now there just needs to be a way to weigh bags with an app!
KLM’s app offers some other augmented reality features as well, including a 360-degree display of a Dreamliner aircraft and, in the KLM Houses App, a look at Anthony Fokker’s House 98.
Before he sang with Queen, Freddie Mercury was a baggage handler at London’s Heathrow Airport.
And today, September 5, 2018 – on what would have been Mercury’s 72nd birthday – Heathrow Airport and British Airways came up with the idea to put modern-day baggage handlers together with choreographers to create a performance of Queen’s “Break Free.”
If you happen to be in Heathrow Terminal 5 today, keep an eye out of these baggage handlers performing the dance in person during the airport’s “Freddie for a Day” tribute.
Or watch a video of the dance here.
Want more Queen and Freddie Mercury?
On September 5, passengers at Heathrow will find Queen songs on the Arrivals boards in Terminal 5.
Also on September 5, any travler named Freddie, Frederick or Farrokh (Mercury’s real name) departing from Terminal 5 will be invited (along with their traveling companions) to use British Airways’ First class lounge.
And on November 2, Twentieth Century Fox will release a film about Queen and the life of Freddie Mercury, called “Bohemian Rhapsody,” in the U.S. (The UK opening is October 24.)
Good news for air travelers who check their bags and worry about those bags getting to their destination.
According to the just-issued SITA 2018 Baggage Report, airlines around the world have once again improved the rate of baggage delivery, continuing a more than decade-long trend of improvement which has seen baggage mishandling drop by 70% since 2007.
The rate of bag mishandling has dropped, notes SITA, even though 2017 saw a rise in the number of passenger to more than 4 billion.
In 2017, the number of mishandled bags was 5.57 per thousand passengers, the lowest level ever recorded.
That’s good news, but mishandled bags cost the industry an estimated $2.3 billion in 2017. And it is of course a hassle if it is your bag that ends up delayed or lost.
So SITA is encouraging airlines to continue investing in end-to-end bag tracking.
“Over the last decade, we have seen significant improvements in bag management as airlines have taken advantage of technology,” said Barbara Dalibard, CEO, SITA, “End-to-end tracking produces data which reveals where improvements can be made in operational processes. While we won’t see a sudden change in 2018, it is a real turning point for the industry as airlines begin to unlock the value of the tracking data for the 4.65 billion bags they carry.”
For a look at what happens to your checked bags once you hand it over at the check-in counter, see my recent At the Airport column on USA TODAY: The trip your luggage takes without you.
My ‘At the Airport’ column for USA Today this month was all about the journey luggage takes between the check-in counter and the plane.
Here’s a slightly shortened version of the original column:
For passengers, the route from airport curb, through security, to the gate and onto the plane usually proceeds in straightforward, if often slow, irritating and all too familiar steps.
But what about the journey checked luggage takes from the check-in counter to the plane?
That process is a mystery to most travelers, but not a secret, so I visited Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (SEA) to follow the route luggage takes from the ticket counter, into the “bag well” (a noisy, cavernous, machine and luggage-filled area where all checked bags spend time) and out to the planes.
Sea-Tac Airport, like many other fast-growing airports around the country, is working with the Transportation Security Administration to upgrade and optimize its current baggage handling system to make the process faster, smoother and more reliable.
But, at just about every airport, the route a bag takes from the check-in counter to the plane continues to be, essentially, the same.
“You come into the airport lobby and you or an agent at your airline ticket counter puts a bag tag on the bag,” said Ed Weitz, Capital Project Manager for the Port of Seattle. “The airline then associates that bag tag with a ten-digit code and puts it on the [moving] belt so it can go through the wall and into the airport’s baggage handling system on the other side.”
At SEA, the ‘other side’ is like a highway made up of 12 miles of conveyor belts (10 miles for outbound bags; 2 for inbound bags headed to bag claim). Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport has 14 miles of conveyors across its five terminals and, at Los Angeles International Airport, the Tom Bradley International Terminal (TBIT), which processes about 25,000 outbound bags a day, has 3 miles of conveyor all its own.
By contrast, at tiny Walla Walla Regional Airport in Washington State, where there are 4 or 5 roundtrip flights a day (depending on the day) there are 20 feet of conveyor belts in the bag handling system. At Eastern Oregon Regional Airport in Pendleton, which offers 3 roundtrips daily to Portland on Boutique Air, “Bags travel about 25 yards on a private, hand-pushed baggage cart, often by the same person that checked you in,” said airport manager Steven Chrisman.
I wasn’t able to travel with the bags on the conveyors at the Seattle Airport, but both DFW Airport and Amsterdam Schiphol Airport have shared short videos offering thrilling bag eye-views of the journey.
At SEA, checked bags from various airlines mingle together on the conveyor system that first takes the bags to and through one the TSA’s Explosives Detection System (EDS) machines.
If the bags are cleared, they go to the ‘sortation’ phase of their journey, where luggage tags are automatically scanned and bags are divvied up by airline.
After that, a system of diverters sends bags by batches of flights to a carousel ‘makeup’ area where bag handlers armed with tag readers stand ready to manually separate bags by flight.
“As the bag comes through on the conveyor belt, I scan it to see if it’s a bag for my flight,” said Delta Air Lines Ramp Agent Kim Farrington. If so, Farrington transfers the bag from the carousel to a cart that, when full, gets driven out to the plane where handlers move the bags from the cart to a belt loader that sends them up into the plane.
For wide-body aircraft, containers filled with baggage may be taken from the bag well and loaded directly into the hold.
On Delta, and other airlines that have embedded RFID (radio frequency identification) tags into the traditional bag tags, there’s an added step: a photo eye reads the RFID into on the bag tag as its goes onto the plane and notifies a passenger via an app that their bags have been loaded. When the bags come off the plane at the other end, the photo eye reads it again and lets the passenger know they’ll soon be reunited with their luggage.
Better Bag Hygiene
Cameras, RFID tracking systems and other improvements are helping lower the number of checked bags that are lost, damaged, delayed or pilfered. But Dereck Howard, Delta Air Line’s Department Manager, Below Wing at Sea-Tac Airport, told me the number of lost and delayed bags could be lower if more passengers practiced better “bag hygiene.”
That includes making sure old luggage tags are removed and new ones are put on neatly.
“If you are self-tagging, don’t put the tag somewhere where it can slip off,” said Howard, “And be sure to peel off the little secondary ‘bingo’ tag from the bag tag and put it somewhere else on the bag so we can read that if the main tag falls off.”
Howard also advises passengers to “neaten up,” their luggage before checking it in. That includes securing loose straps that might get caught in the conveyor belt rollers and machinery and making sure not to check bags that are over packed or those with faulty or straining zippers or closures that could pop open during the bag’s journey.
