Air New Zealand chief digital officer Nikhil Ravishankar.
Air New Zealand is expanding a bag tracing trial to cover thousands more travellers, as it works to ease anxiety over where affected passengers’ luggage actually is.
The airline plans to make the scheme widely available from the middle of the year.
As part of a sweeping upgrade of its digital capability, Air New Zealand will expand a test run of bag tracing to 25 per cent of its app users on domestic flights and to 5 per cent of users on short-haul transtasman flights.
The feature allows customers to view the last recorded status of their bag(s) in the Air NZ app while they are travelling. After completing a bag drop, “check status” will appear on the baggage card on the app’s flight details screen.
With information on the location of their bags, passengers can track the progress of their luggage throughout their journey – from check-in to onboard and when it arrives at their destination.
Air New Zealand chief digital officer Nikhil Ravishankar said it was dedicated to becoming the world’s leading airline in digital baggage tracking.
A surge in the number of misplaced bags over the summer, mainly due to disruption to flights in the United States, accelerated the rollout of new systems. The 13-year-old app has undergone a major overhaul and can now be updated almost daily if necessary.
”Updates to our app last year mean we are now able to be more adaptable when it comes to creating and adding digital solutions that solve pain points for customers. Baggage tracking is a perfect example of this,” said Ravishankar.
“Customers can track the journey of their bag and receive guidance on what to do if their bag has taken a detour. In an upcoming release, customers will also be able to report and monitor mishandled baggage via the app.”
Running a pilot of the feature gave the airline the opportunity to trial and test it among a small group of passengers and troubleshoot, which will allow a more seamless rollout to all app users towards the middle of this year.
For the last year, Air New Zealand experienced an average of 4 mishandled bags per 1000 passengers, but with its partner airlines had to track down hundreds of items that were in different places to their passengers during the summer.
The bag tracing system differs from Apple AirTags, which Ravishankar says acts as a locator beacon attached to a bag – if there are other iPhones around.
“When you’re in, say, Auckland, and your bag hasn’t left Vancouver, you know that it’s in Vancouver.”
But that’s as far as it goes. The AirTags don’t tell you where your bag is in the complex aviation system, unlike Air NZ’s tracing tool, which shares the same information with users that the airline has.
“What we’re doing now is, through the app, we’re making that information available to you so you can see where your bag is.”
To deal with bags that do end up being misplaced, the airline is also working with the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) to create a new digital tool for its Baggage Tracing Unit to speed up clearance processes and remove the requirement to use paper receipts.
“In partnership with MPI, we have developed a new digital system that streamlines the biosecurity baggage screening process, introducing efficiencies that ensure customers are reunited with mishandled bags faster,” said Ravishankar.
Through speedy development during the bag crisis, tech was able to do the job of about 20 extra people.
But he says that no matter what technology is introduced, it’s not foolproof.
“The airline system is one complex interconnected network, and so depending on how complex your itinerary is, the chance of it [a bag] getting out of the system still remains,” said Ravishankar.
“At the end of the day, there’s a human being picking up your bag and loading it into a baggage belt.”
Last December, when storms hit North America, the baggage belts were frozen.
“So it was easier to just transport the people first, and then when the infrastructure came back online, to get your bags back to whatever destination you’re heading to. Digital technology isn’t going to solve weather issues.”
Extensive customer research was done for the rebuild of the app, which is used a million times a month, predominantly by short-haul flyers.
Modifications lay the foundation for other features, including a new home screen, helping with a contactless journey through airports and allowing customers to track their baggage status or customise their entertainment and meal experience ahead of their flight.
Ravishankar said that in future, airlines would move away from sticky-paper bag tags to a much more sophisticated electronic tag.
“We’ve got a few prototypes we’re trialling and we’re working through developing a few more. It’s not an overnight change.”
Airport infrastructure would need to be upgraded, but he envisaged phones - some of the world’s most powerful biometrics devices – helping to transform journeys.
“The front of any airport is really a glorified baggage weighing scale, and a printer. Imagine if you didn’t need to do either one of those things so as you walked in, that we knew who you were, we knew what you were carrying,” he said.
“You could just drop your bags, go straight through to the lounge, get on your plane and have the peace of mind that your bag’s coming with you.”
That would change the entire nature of what an airport is and what infrastructure is needed in them.
“And that also then feeds into back-of-house; how you handle baggage and how you load bags onto a plane and so on,” he said.
“In New Zealand, we’ve got this great opportunity because we can work closely with airport companies, Customs, MPI and all of these agencies to really leapfrog and imagine what the future travel experience could look like.”
The airline’s chief executive Greg Foran told the Trenz tourism showcase in Christchurch that Air New Zealand aimed to be the world’s leading digital airline.
“As I say to the Air New Zealand team, one point for talking, nine points for doing. So we’re executing our plan with precision.”
As part of the digital push, the airline has also overhauled its rostering and duty tools for pilots and cabin crew, with all being issued with iPhones with tools to give them more insight into flights and who is on them.
Flight decks are also going completely paperless. Paper flight plans – which run for several pages and if changed last-minute need to be rushed to departure gates – are being replaced by a new tool, FlightKeys.
The new system pulls information from connected systems and automatically creates or updates a flight plan and then notifies the planner if there are any parameters that require review or intervention. Some 29 integrated services enable FlightKeys to source data from both existing Air New Zealand systems and external vendors providing data such as weather information.
Ravishankar joined the airline from Vector in 2021, where he was also the CDO.
He said he joined as Air New Zealand started to rebuild after the Covid shock.
“Covid was unprecedented for the airline industry, and so when we started to think about how we build back, we really had the option of either just building back to where we were or to really, genuinely look at what the airline of the future would look like,” he said.
“The airline of the future is probably going to be a digital business that happens to be in aviation, as opposed to an airline that happens to have a digital department.”
One of the first things he had to do was make sure that 95 per cent of his team no longer worked for him, but were blended into the business itself.
“So, when you now look under the covers of Air New Zealand, you don’t have this big digital team, you have a cross-functional set of units that have business people, digital people all working together now on solving a number of issues across all aspects of the airline.”
He said it had been a bold move for the airline.
“We’re one of the first in the world to go down that path, and we’re starting to see the benefits of moving into that sort of that way of working.”
The company is now on the hunt for new investors.