Daily match by airlines & airports

Baggage travelling into Gibraltar Airport does not always arrive at the same time as the passenger attached, causing annoyance, delay and at times costly inconvenience to the owner. A regular cause of a bag missing its flight is what the airlines call "bumping" the bag — to ensure that the flight takes off with its cargo load trim, ie not overweight, a bag or bags will be held back even though checked-in, especially heavy bags or golf-clubs.

Once notified by the passenger of the non-arrival of the bag, the air line wit! put in to the Airport of de parture a "Match" request and the bag when found,or Matched,is put on the next flight, sometimes same day, sometimes the following day. Compensation is sometimes offered.

One airline, Easyjet, which may consider flying into the planned dual-nationality Gibraltar terminal, in one instance paid a £25 allowance to a passenger to buy necessities like toiletries while waibng for the lost bag — in this case the bag turned up late the following day having been to Oslo, Norway during a flight from Malaga to Bristol.

Matching also helps reveal whether a missing bag is not just bumped,but actually lost or stolen. The majority of lost bags turn up sometime later, but possibly weel« later, and can then be matched once they have completed their walkabout to a destination on the other side of the planet because of an incorrect reading of the bagticket. Stolen bags are those bags which never get matched,but it can be a while before an insurance com pany accepts the bag is stolen, and not still away on its solitary travels.

The quantities of baggage han dled by an international airport like Heathrow, from which there are daily landings in Gibraltar, are mas sive. Heathrow Airport deals with a take-off or landing every minute of the twenty-four hour day — to handle the baggage going on and off those flights, 8,500 conveyor belts are used, totalling ten miles in length,moving daily 200,000 pieces of baggage through the carousels that connect with the planes.

Those baggage movements are controlled by the barcodes on the baggage ticket and it is the accurate scanning of the bar-code that en sures the bag goes with you on your flight to Gibraltar, rather than get ting mishandled in the transfer and apparently setting off on its own to Singapore,or perhaps just to Malta.

A new terminal being discussed for Gibraltar, currently in talking stage with the politicians, will be able to take advantage of the latest developments in high technology systems to ensure that baggage flows smoothly and to the correct destination. The industry is now looking at radio-frequency tags as an alternative to paper tags, as bags get lost or delayed when the barcode labels are damaged — the more times a bag is handled, the more likely damage is to occur which is why it is at the transfer points that things go wrong.

Then there is human error — if a baggage handler, say, tired after a long night, is manning a carousel with suitcases coming through for more than one flight, there is a chance that he might load some of them into the wrong container. The solution, already being imple mented at Heathrow,is to eliminate the carousel by having a different chute for every flight. Plans for Ter minal 5, when it opens in 2008, in clude some conveyor belts that can take luggage all the way to the air craft-stand. Buteven when bags are loaded correctly, there may be the frustration of waiting excessive time for them at the other end.Consumer watchdogs claim that such delays are almost always due to the ineffi ciency of an airline and its handling agents.There is no system on which to blame the failure, they say, as the bags are simply taken from the air craft to the hall and put on the con veyor belt that brings the bags to the passenger for collection.

"Occasionally a carousel might be out of service, but usually an airline just isn't doing things quickly enough. Most aim for the first bag to appear within 20 minutes of the aircraft touching down; the last should be out within 35 minutes,or 40 minutes maximum. We encour age airlines to prioritise transfer bag gage, and that should be through within 25 minutes."

At Gibraltar Airport passeng ers find, on average, their bags have appeared for pick-up within 15 min utes, although two flights landing within a short time ofeach other can cause an increase in the wait time.

To help avoid the number oftimes your bags do go off for trips on their own, the airlines consumer advice people offer the following tips;

"Make sure you remove old labels from your luggage,in case they con fuse the barcode readers;if your bag has lots of straps, tape them up to stop them getting caughtin machin ery; and don't bother with travel padlocks — they just advertise that there's something in the bag worth stealing, and most of them can be snapped off with a pencil."

Meanwhile, they say, the main danger is that a bag opens acciden tally because the two.halves of the zip come apart,a problem for which the baggage-handling industry has not yet developed a solution.