Lost bags and inefficient airports: can things really only get better?
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 19 March 2026
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On a typical holiday plane with 160 passengers, one piece of checked baggage will go missing. That’s the shocking statistic from Sita, the IT provider for the aviation industry.
But Georg Oschmann, VP Product Management for Sita, has been telling me how tech will reduce the number of stray bags and improve the response when cases do go missing. His colleague, Nick Batchelor, VP Strategy & Innovation (Airports), says that airports can increase capacity and reduce disruption by using smarter technology.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Thursday the 19th of March. |
| 0:09.3 | There's a couple of annoying things about lying, well, perhaps more than two, but some of them include the fact that if you check in a bag, |
| 0:18.0 | according to the latest statistics from CETA, which is the global aviation |
| 0:24.0 | telecommunications specialists, you have a 6.3 and a thousand chance that your bag is going to |
| 0:30.8 | not travel with you, which would be annoying. That means, for instance, on a typical Airbus |
| 0:37.2 | a 320 or a Boeing 737 that one |
| 0:40.6 | passenger is not going to arrive and find their bag on the carousel. Another annoying thing is that |
| 0:46.3 | there isn't quite enough room in airports for all the flights that the airports themselves and the |
| 0:52.8 | airlines and the passengers would like there to be. |
| 0:56.3 | I am with two gentlemen who claim that they are going to transform this. Nick Batchelor and also |
| 1:03.1 | George Oshman from Sita. Okay, can we start with baggage? It goes missing. It's annoying. |
| 1:12.9 | That's just been part of flying really since the Wright brothers, so no more to say on that. Oh, you're absolutely right. And I think we're at |
| 1:17.8 | Sita, we're really trying our best to make it better. We know it's not yet perfect. But if you |
| 1:23.3 | look at the numbers throughout the years, they have been, you know, becoming better and better. |
| 1:27.2 | And I think what we have to acknowledge is in our industry is that we are still living in a really |
| 1:33.0 | complex world. For instance, what we introduced from CETA together with Apple is a, you know, |
| 1:38.5 | those little apple, you know, chips that you probably know in order to find your stuff. |
| 1:42.6 | We now have the possibility that if a bag from you gets lost, |
| 1:46.8 | we can identify that bag with your help together |
| 1:49.8 | and make the experience, even if you lose your bag, a little bit lighter. |
| 1:54.2 | But we have to obviously acknowledge that it's still a pain for passengers |
| 1:58.1 | and we feel that pain as well since we are all traveling, you know, together. |
... |
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