Brent Pin­heiro

brent.pin­heiro@guardian.co.tt

Every day, hun­dreds of thou­sands of trav­ellers step off planes on­ly to dis­cov­er at the bag­gage carousel their lug­gage nev­er made it. In fact, ac­cord­ing to a 2025 SI­TA Bag­gage IT In­sights Re­port, 33.4 mil­lion bags were mis­han­dled in 2024. That’s 33.4 mil­lion bags ei­ther de­layed, dam­aged, or lost/stolen. And with an­oth­er peak trav­el sea­son up­on us, lo­cal car­ri­er Caribbean Air­lines (CAL) is hop­ing to pro­vide some peace of mind to pas­sen­gers with the in­tro­duc­tion of its free bag­gage no­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem across its net­work. Sim­ply put, pas­sen­gers re­ceive an au­to­mat­ic email when their bag­gage is han­dled at four key points: at check-in, when it’s loaded on­to the air­craft, when it’s of­floaded from the air­craft, and when it’s on the bag­gage carousel. The sys­tem will even tell the pas­sen­ger which bag­gage carousel their lug­gage can be col­lect­ed from.

CAL part­nered with UK-based firm Lug­gage Lo­gis­tics to im­ple­ment the Load & Track bag­gage man­age­ment sys­tem which it be­gan rolling out on a phased ba­sis in No­vem­ber 2024. Ac­cord­ing to a me­dia re­lease from the com­pa­ny, bag­gage track­ing no­ti­fi­ca­tions are now avail­able across the air­line’s en­tire net­work. Caribbean Air­lines Act­ing CEO, Nir­mala Ra­mai said it’s part of the com­pa­ny’s fo­cus on im­prov­ing the cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence. “By giv­ing our pas­sen­gers time­ly, ac­cu­rate up­dates about their bag­gage, we are ad­dress­ing one of the most com­mon con­cerns in air trav­el. Build­ing con­fi­dence through­out the jour­ney,” she said.

The ini­tia­tive aligns with glob­al avi­a­tion stan­dards. The In­ter­na­tion­al Air Trans­porta­tion As­so­ci­a­tion (IA­TA), a trade as­so­ci­a­tion rep­re­sent­ing 350 air­lines+, re­quires mem­bers to track bag­gage un­der IA­TA Res­o­lu­tion 753. IA­TA says the aim of the res­o­lu­tion is to re­duce mis­han­dling and in­crease pas­sen­ger sat­is­fac­tion.

Ac­cord­ing to Brent Gas­pard, Air­ports and Ground Op­er­a­tions Ex­ec­u­tive Man­ag­er, the air­line has seen a drop in the num­ber of mis­han­dled bags since it im­ple­ment­ed the sys­tem. Though he de­clined to give ex­act fig­ures, he ex­plained how the sys­tem makes it eas­i­er to lo­cate bags should they go miss­ing. “We have these sys­tems in place to be able to check to see that the per­sons are scan­ning at each of the check­points, be­cause that’s a crit­i­cal part of be­ing able to give the mes­sage that your bag has been de­liv­ered,” he said. “But what hap­pens if, for ex­am­ple, you scan your bag at check-in, and it’s sup­posed to go to the air­craft, but it gets di­vert­ed some­how and ends up some­where else. We would be aware that the bag was not loaded on­to the air­craft, so it gives our team the abil­i­ty to do a quick check to see where the bag was last scanned, and then search for the bag,” he added.

Ac­cord­ing to SI­TA, bag­gage track­ing is no longer a ser­vice en­hance­ment but rather an op­er­a­tional ne­ces­si­ty as 47% of to­day’s pas­sen­gers want the abil­i­ty to track their bags in re­al time. Bag­gage no­ti­fi­ca­tions for CAL pas­sen­gers are cur­rent­ly be­ing de­liv­ered to the email ad­dress pro­vid­ed at book­ing or dur­ing on­line check-in and Gas­pard con­firmed that there are plans to add the op­tion to the air­line’s mo­bile app. How­ev­er, he said text mes­sage no­ti­fi­ca­tions are not cur­rent­ly be­ing con­sid­ered due to the cost.