KEY POINTS:
- Have you had a luggage nightmare?
I'm been sitting at Heathrow airport for the last eight hours waiting for a flight home after catching up on all the latest consumer electronics at the IFA tech show in Berlin.
I've also been playing a little game of find-the-bag as my luggage went
missing on the way over five days ago and has remained so ever since.
I'm lucky enough never to have lost or even had a bag arrived late, so I was a bit unsure of what to do on this occasion.
What I ended up doing was standing in queues, talking to unhelpful people at British Airways and baggage handling companies, and generally feeling like an extra in The Office as I entered the realm of the lost luggage retrieval officer. So much for German efficiency.
But it got me thinking about what part the internet can play in the retrieval of bags that have disappeared en route to somewhere. It turns out, the airlines, keen to fob off people who have been wearing the same clothes for three days, are a step ahead of me.
My new favourite website is mylostbag.com, which I've been checking regularly for updates on my lost luggage. Visiting the site is a help of a lot more informative and much quicker than talking to a human on the subject.
Once you lodge a lost bag claim, you're assigned a code, which you can punch into Mylostbag to find where it has been processed in the system.
Courier companies are already into parcel tracking in a big way and with the bigger players like DHL and Fedex you can generally log on to a website to find out which stage of the supply chain your package is traveling through.
But such systems aren't foolproof. For instance, I know that my bag made it to London and is lying with hundreds of other bags somewhere in Heathrow Airport. The problem is that no-one knows where it is.
Just being in the computer system doesn't mean it can be physically located. However, if my bag had a RFID (radio frequency identification) tag on it, all it would take to find it is for someone to drive through the baggage handling area with a scanner to find it.
My bag would pop up like a laptop finding a wireless hotspot and I'd be flying out to Hong Kong in a fresh set of clothes. Anyway, RFID is inching towards wider use and acceptance, though I'm not holding my breath that the airlines will be in the front line of adopters.
Back on the web, there's also a good website for lost luggage hunters run by the Air Transport Users Council.
And the Travel Insider outlines some chillingly familiar excuses that are commonly given by airport staff looking to avoid helping you, the lost luggage owner, especially when the subject of reimbursement for lost luggage is raised.
It sort of brings to mind a line from that old Dire Straits song:
"Scarred for life, no compensation, private investigation..."
The local tech blogosphere:
Richard MacManus asks you to pick the top web technologies for the next decade.