The difference is huge in terms of cost impact. For example, Northwest Airlines, one of the most technologically advanced carriers, says that only about once a month is unaccompanied luggage discovered and removed on its 31 international flights from Kennedy Airport. Northwest officials said the extra bags have never been sinister. He also said there are too many variables in the cost of a ticket to accurately estimate how much bag match on domestic flights would cost passengers. Wolfgang Weil, a German expert, estimates that full bag match costs between five and 15 cents per piece of luggage.
Proponents acknowledge that the technical challenges are daunting.
In Frankfurt, the system handles 92,500 bags per day on about 600 flights, officials say. In contrast, there are about 62,000 departing bags each day at Kennedy and 42,300 at LaGuardia Airport. In the United States, many airlines already use bar codes on luggage tags to match bags on international flights with passengers' boarding passes. And some experts argue that if airlines were forced to do bag match, their economic self-interest would spur them to quickly develop speedier methods. My initial feeling is it isn't as difficult as some quite well-informed, reasonable people would argue.