Lost or delayed bags can ruin a vacation or a business trip. Fears of such a calamity even led IATA director general Willie Walsh to once go 35 years without checking a bag, Walsh confessed during a speech last fall in Chicago.

Now, a new IATA initiative will aim to assist with one of the biggest vulnerabilities in baggage handling — interline baggage transfer — by helping airlines better communicate with one another, and with airports, as they deliver checked bags across interline itineraries.

The trade group plans to launch a pilot project to test its digital messaging standard for baggage exchange communication late this year. Such a standard would enable airlines to share information, such as images of bags and baggage geolocations, which cannot be supported by legacy bag messaging technology, IATA said.

It’s the latest standard-setting enterprise by IATA as it seeks to pull airlines away from the legacy systems that it believes hamstring the industry.

Notably, IATA developed its new distribution capability digital merchandising standards in an effort to modernize the capabilities that airlines have when selling via agencies. In a related effort, IATA’s digital One Order standard is geared toward simplifying ticket processing and servicing by consolidating e-tickets, PNRs and ancillary purchase records into a single document.

The trade group’s push on the baggage front is meant to tackle one of the airline industry’s most intractable problems. Globally, airlines mishandled 6.9 bags per 1,000 last year, according to the annual report issued by the technology company SITA, which develops bag tracking and touchless bag-drop technology.

But on international routes, where interline itineraries are more common, the baggage mishandling rate was 12.1 per thousand.

Flyers say that dropping off and collecting bags are the two biggest sources of negative experiences within the control of airlines, according to IATA’s 2023 World Passenger survey.

Requiring airlines to track baggage

IATA took a significant step to address bag tracking in 2018 when it adopted its Resolution 753, which requires that airlines track baggage at four key points in their journey: drop-off, aircraft loading, delivery to the transfer area and delivery to the passenger.

Resolution 753 also requires that airlines share that information with interline ticket partners.

A survey of airlines and airports by IATA this spring found that 44% of airlines had fully implemented the resolution’s requirements, while another 41% were in the process of doing so. In addition, 75% of the 94 airports surveyed have the capability for Resolution 753 baggage tracking, most commonly via barcodes.

A reliance on old technology

IATA said a key issue that is holding back many airlines from implementing Resolution 753 requirements is their reliance on the costly legacy messaging technology called Type B. It has evolved since its introduction in the 1960s, said IATA director of ground operations Monika Mejstrikova, but the annual industry cost of baggage messaging to the industry is $1.05 billion.

If just 10% of airline baggage messaging was instead transmitted via digital messaging, global savings would be an estimated $70 million per year. IATA also said the high cost of Type B messaging contributes to problems with message quality, which leads to an increase in baggage mishandling.

According to the SITA study, transfer points, where communication between airlines is often necessary, are a particular sticking point on a checked bag’s journey. Among bags that were delayed last year, the most common cause by far was transfer mishandling, at 46%.

Mejstrikova said that developing the digital messaging standard will be neither difficult nor costly but achieving global implementation will be another matter.

“As the industry is still working with Type B,” she said, “the major challenge is transitioning from the old to the new without disrupting the ecosystem.”

* This story originally appeared in Travel Weekly.