Track Your Baggage with Air New Zealand’s New App Feature

Following a successful initial trial run, Air New Zealand is expanding the availability of its baggage monitoring function to a wider customer base. The airline is adhering to a global trend of luggage tracking, particularly in light of the challenging summer months in which some international carriers saw a high rate of misplaced baggage.

Air New Zealand is now extending the test run of its baggage monitoring function and making the service available to 25% of its app users for domestic travel and 5% for international short-haul travel after a successful pilot program of the feature.

According to Air New Zealand, the functionality enables users to check the most recent status of their bag(s) in the Air NZ app. The luggage card on the flight details section in the app will display ‘Check status’ after the bag drop is complete, it was added.

Passengers using this function will be able to track the path of their luggage from the time of check-in through arrival at the destination. Nikhil Ravishankar, the Chief Digital Officer of Air New Zealand, said, “Piloting the features gives us the opportunity to trial and test among a small group of passengers to troubleshoot any challenges, which will allow a more seamless rollout to all app users towards the middle of this year.”

A function that would indicate that a passenger’s bags were safely loaded onto the airplane was also launched by Korean Air in 2020 for flights leaving from Seoul Incheon International Airport (ICN). In 2019, China Eastern apparently began offering a comparable service on a few internal routes in the nation. WeChat has incorporated the app, which enables real-time updates during the voyage.

All international airlines deal with the issue of misplaced or lost baggage. Last summer, when airlines were dealing with personnel shortages and passengers who had to wait days or weeks to receive their luggage back, the problem was particularly bad. As the airline sector started to recover from COVID-19, the global mishandled baggage rate increased by 24% to 4.35 bags per thousand passengers in 2021, according to IT service provider SITA.

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