Ancient Observer

My friend Boris told me about these. Apparently. the Dark Web is already selling readers of these gadgets, and it is easy to combine the info from these with the various caches of data from previous hacks.

As it is BA's IT, what could possibly go wrong?

PMMMDL

Why would you need 6 of them for a Single White Male Burmese Orangutan?

Tiger_lily

Irreverent Medusa

Ooooh there is provision for speakers. and a mike. We can look forward to our luggage asking "are we there yet?" every 5 minutes.

Edit: there's some reasonably far-fetched stuff too in that patent, such as "content sensing" what's inside the luggage and reconciliating that with your packing list, or being able to use the app to order items online for delivery at your destination, as well as security being able to query contents at checkpoints via the tag.

Mixbury

I don't see why these would need to encode anything other than a GUID, and could therefore be safer,

I had a friend staying with me last year who picked up the wrong bag from the carousel. From the printed baggage label I was able to discover the owner's email address, cell phone number, address, dob, employer, the details of the sex crime he had been accused of, and the address of his estranged wife and children.

warreng

I do recall reading that the Qantas smart tags serve a dual purpose, but can't find anything official on it.

Supposedly even if you're traveling on an itinerary that doesn't allow you to check your bag in with a smart tag, each tag is RFID coded with your FF number. That means that if the paper tag is damaged or lost and the bag arrives at a destination with a smart tag reader they can scan the smart tag and match it to your FF number as a kind of failsafe. Of course, the BAEC tags with a membership number printed on them probably achieve the same thing but these days everything has to be "smart".

I do hope more OW airlines adopt compatible smart tag technology and eventually allow for smart tags to be used on international routes. For example, if RFID readers at SYD could read BA smart tags, BA smart tags could theoretically be used in place of paper tags on flights between LHR and SYD.

Dover2Golf

The Qantas tags now work well but on introduction bags were turning up all over the place and people gave up using them in the midst of chaos that resulted and QF had to do a lot of work to get people back to using them having sorted the problems. Now before that Qantas did not have a poor reputation for IT.

So this is BA and BA IT....

I'll stick to paper tags.

LondonElite

Like what? Anything that a photograph of the information on a paper tag couldn't?

jerub

Once I get mine, I want to repeat this experiment: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-40577923

UncleDude

I would rather somebody invested in a system of getting Luggage from the Aircraft to the Carousel at MIA in Under an Hour

tsmnc

YClass

I think I read somewhere that digital baggage tags will be introduced next year and will cost around Ł60. I for one am quite looking forward to this one if it works like QF (granted I last saw that system some 8 years ago!).

snaxmuppet

I am a massive technogeek and at first though I wanted one of these but having thought about it I am not yet convinced of the benefit to the passenger although I can see many more benefits to the airline/airport.

SteveF

I wonder when the first mass hack of iTags will take place. And where all of the luggage will end up.

zkzkz

The only advantage I see is probably not even something BA/LHR would consider ... Being able to reroute bags en route. That is, if you miss a connection or fly standby on an earlier flight change the bag tag to match the new routing immediately. This seems like it would be possible even today though -- of course the tag wouldn't change today but when they scan it with a scanner the computer could look up the new routing. So the fact that they don't even try to do this makes me think it's not a technological limitation.

Other than that I see no advantage to the occasional traveler. For the frequent traveler I suppose merely having to remove the old bag tags on every trip must get old.