Article

Can RFID put an end to lost luggage?

McCarran Airport has done away with barcodes in its baggage check department, opting instead for RFID tags. It's an experiment that has paid off with greater accuracy and fewer lost bags. But is the technology still too expensive to take hold industry-wide?

February 12, 2006 by James Bickers — Editor, Networld Alliance

McCarran Airport opened its hangar doors in Las Vegas in 1948. In its first full year of operation, 42,000 passengers passed through its gates. In 2004, that number was up to 42 million.

Vegas itself has grown correspondingly, and perhaps more than many cities its size, it has embraced new technology with wider, more receptive arms. The gaming industry typically does not sit on the cutting edge but rather pushes it, with its twin goals of increasing revenue and foiling fraudsters.

In October 2003, McCarran took a giant step by becoming the first U.S. airport to implement Common Use Self-Service, or CUSS, kiosks - check-in devices that were airline-nonspecific. Under the branded name SpeedCheck, the McCarron kiosks allow fliers to print boarding passes themselves from any kiosk in the facility, regardless of the airline they are flying.

According to Samuel Ingalls, a director of information systems for McCarron, next month will see another innovation at these kiosks: the ability to print luggage tags with embedded RFID antennas.

Why should anyone care? Ingalls said RFID tags might mean the end of the great heartache - and expense - of the travel industry: lost and misrouted baggage.

Minor nuisance, major expense

In preparing its cost analysis, McCarran assumed that traditional barcode-based tag systems would have a read-accuracy of 90 percent. This, it turned out, was optimistic - anytime a reader lens gets dirty or misaligned, that number drops even lower. But assuming the best, 90 percent still wasn't good enough.

"We're running about 70,000 outbound bags on a daily basis, and the math ends up being pretty easy," Ingalls said. "If you miss 10 percent of those bags, that's 7,000 bags, and that's a significant labor cost. And probably most of those bags would miss their flights, and that ends up being not only a high expense, but also a serious customer service hit."

McCarran currently has two new screening nodes that have been certified by the TSA, with the rest of the building slated to receive RFID-enabled readers in the coming years. Ingalls said results so far have been astounding.

"We are seeing the read rates that we anticipated," he said. "Our target rate ultimately is 99.8 percent accuracy. It's not only good, but it's about as near to perfect as I think you're going to get. That really was what made the case for us - that ability to achieve near-perfection and to avoid all of the costs and the customer service issues with lost or mishandled baggage."

Much of the press on RFID has focused on how much both readers and tags cost, but Ingalls said that even at today's prices, the technology made sense for McCarron.

"In terms of the hardware itself - the antennas that scan the bags, and other associated hardware - that hardware is actually cheaper. It's maybe a third to a half of the cost of setting up an optical system. An optical system has to be very finely tuned, and it's trying to read from all these angles and points trying to read that barcode going down the line."

An RFID antenna doesn't care which direction it is pointing. Not only that, airports have complete knowledge of where each package is within the entire operating chain at all times.

Still, price is an issue, with the average cost of a tag hovering around 20 cents. "But even at that initial price point, we feel that it made cost-benefit sense to implement right now."

Not right for everyone

The story was different for Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, which experimented with RFID baggage management in the 1990s. According to director of public safety and security Jeff Fitch, it wasn't a good fit at the time, but it likely will be in the coming years.

"At the time, the RFID technology, even though we knew it was the coming thing, the cost of it was prohibitive," he said. "We were talking about 50 cents plus per bag tag, just a few years ago. Because we had a system designed using laser readers, we made the determination not to redesign the system and use RFID."

Seattle-Tacoma International, like many airports, is undergoing a severe makeover prompted by a Congressional act of 2001 that requires all checked baggage to be scanned by an electronic method. The airport was in the middle of a multi-year renovation when the 9/11 attacks took place, building a new terminal with 14 airline gates. Rather than scrap the work they had been doing, they opted for a system that would integrate easily into the work that had already been done.

But in time, Fitch said, the airport will likely go back and retrofit its systems for RFID.

"Our decision was, let's get an operational system up, based on technology that works well enough to meet our needs at the time," he said. "We know that RFID is a lot more reliable and accurate."

Airports aren't the only entities drawn to the potential cost-savings that RFID seems to offer. Delta Airlines made a high-profile entry in 2003, committing approximately $25 million to applying the technology to its internal baggage-handling system.

Many analysts thought Delta's foray into RFID, if successful, might become a sort of blueprint for future implementations. But the airline's bankruptcy filing in September 2005 led to a change in priorities.

"We haven't completely put it aside, but it is on the back burner, and there's no talk of when it is coming back, or if it is coming back," said Benet Wilson, spokesperson for Delta. "We have bigger priorities right now."

About James Bickers

---

None

Connect with James: