RFID and American miss their connection

Lost baggage -- the bane of air travelers and airlines alike -- would seem a perfect problem for RFID to solve: huge volumes of stuff that's getting tagged anyway being moved throughout a defined environment by workers accustomed to using scanners.

After all, the problem of misplaced luggage is only getting worse (1 in every 138 bags lost this year vs. 1 in 155 in '06) … and RFID technology is only getting better.

Ain't happening, says American Airlines, and the reason is simple: RFID is too costly.

That's the assessment tucked in the middle of a New York Times story this morning that focuses on the broader issue of why more bags are going missing and what the airlines are doing to reverse the trend. One reason so much baggage is lost is that the bar-code scanners being used in airports today are remarkably unreliable: as in they're wrong one time in 10.

“We never hit 100 percent — 90 percent is acceptable,” said an airline official who was not standing at a baggage carrousel empty-handed.

RFID would have to do better, no?

American and other domestic airlines have resisted investing in radio frequency identification tags, which are used by big retailers to track inventory and are far more accurate. The tags cost about 20 cents each so it would cost $50,000 a day for American’s 250,000 bags, plus the cost of hardware to read them at each step in the process.

“We don’t lose enough bags to justify that investment,” said Mark Mitchell, American’s managing director of customer experience.

Easy for him to say; he wasn't standing at a baggage carrousel empty-handed, either.

However, it's also easy to understand the thought process of the airlines here. In an industry where mere survival is a day-to-day challenge, there could be no other way to look at the baggage-loss equation.

Happy travels.