| | November 20158CIOReviewhave been a top tier flyer for many more years than I care to remember on numerous airlines starting all the way back to TWA. The food in the TWA first class lounge at JFK could truly make your eyes pop! This of course is not the case today. TWA, which was once owned by Howard Hughes, filed for bankruptcy in 2001 and was acquired by American Airlines. A lot has changed in the industry. Today we pay to belong to Airport clubs simply for peace and quiet and free pretzels and coffee. What has always been a problem, however, then and now, are checked bags and lost luggage!According to J.D. Powers, that conducted a passenger satisfaction study in 2014 for North America's flying business and leisure travelers, 65 percent of passengers check their luggage. More than 50 percent of those that check luggage wait for 15 minutes or longer for their bags at the carousel. Overall satisfaction for those that have to wait is on average 41 points lower than those who do not have to wait. And there are still a shocking two percent of passengers that do not receive their bags at all on arrival. In order to determine how many people are affected by lost bags we will have to do some math. If you take two percent of the 65 percent that check luggage and apply that number against the 3.3B people that flew in 2014 that would indicate almost 43 million people were affected with lost baggage in 2014 annually globally. That number could be a bit less if you assume the airlines outside of the North America handle their customer's baggage in a better manner. That could be the case. According to the 2015 World Airlines Awards, there was not a single North America based carrier that made it in the top 25 ranked world's top 100 airlines.So there are at least two IOT opportunities here if not many more. It is clear that there is an opportunity to improve customer satisfaction around checked baggage and lost baggage. There is also an opportunity to help North American airlines ICollecting and tracking can be made even easier with a new generation of stick-on and disposable sensors that do not even have to retrieved when their job is done`It's 10PM, Do you know where your bags are?'By David Bartlett, CTO, GE Aviationopinionin my
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