Originally Posted by
notquiteaff
I suspect it shows data that is compatible with standard paper bag tags. Even has the green bars for intra-Schengen trips.
And will other airlines adopt the same thing? Or will they have a similar yet app-wise incompatible solution so that I need a different one for every airline I fly? (I suppose they hope their elites don’t cheat on them, but…)
Another question: when using regular bag tags, there are those little bar codes that you or the agent is supposed to put on the various sides of the bag. Presumably to make it easier for scanners routing the bags in the bowels of an airport’s automatic baggage routing system. And perhaps as a backup if the big tag gets mangled/ripped off. This electronic tag doesn’t have that. Is that a concern, or do most people self-tagging their bags don’t know about those bar codes anyway or just have a collection of old barcodes on their bags?
Old thread but I thought I'd chime in...
Those little tags are called bingo tags. They're not usually readable by the automated tag readers which guide and route bags to the planes. They're there purely as a backup to the main, larger IATA tag that we're talking about here. On occasion, the large tag gets caught on a belt or a conveyor and gets ripped off. Without a bingo tag or a large main tag, that bag can't really be sorted to the right plane or anywhere. While the bingo tag does have a bar code, it's small and rarely gets read by the tag readers. However many pax and counter agents don't always take the old bingo tags off, and the newest tag readers can, on occasion, read and resolve the old bingo tags. It doesn't mess up the works too much, but it's best to just get rid of the
old bingo tags.
The BagTag is programmable for multiple carriers that wish to buy in, but only Alaska has shown support for it in the US that I've seen. It'll be up to the other carriers to individually integrate it into their systems.