WWYD Delta Airlines Lose Bags

Multiple Choice

WWYD Delta Airlines lose bags. They need to handle thousands of bags per day and then rush them to connecting planes or baggage carousels. The challenging logistics, however, don't make up for the impact of delays on passengers. In all, 31 million bags are delivered late worldwide each year. In the U.S., seven people per 1,000 passengers, or roughly one per plane, don't get their luggage on time, and they file 7.5 million mishandled baggage reports a year. Over the last decade, the three largest airlines, American, United, and Delta, have been the worst. Delta is 30 percent worse compared to the best airlines. Second, 28 percent more bags are delayed today compared to a decade ago. No wonder passengers are frustrated, especially when charged a handling fee for checked bags. Nothing like paying extra to have the airline lose your bags, especially when Delta brings in $952 million a year in bag fees! Passengers are beginning to realize that bag fees bring in much more than the cost to deliver bags, so they have every right to expect Delta to do a better job delivering bags. After all, if Amazon can send emails and texts notifying customers when their orders leave the warehouse, arrive at their local airports, and are delivered to their homes, then why can't Delta do the same thing with luggage that's supposed to never leave the airport? Delta Airline's historically poor job of handling baggage is clearly related to Delta trailing its competitors in the use of information technology to track and manage baggage handling. While Delta catches up with its competitors in terms of high-tech baggage handling systems, it is the first airline to offer real-time tracking of passengers' bags. Not unlike tracking an Amazon shipment, Delta's real-time tracking allow passengers to know precisely where their bags are from check-in, to the flight on which they're loaded, to the baggage carousel where they're hopefully waiting. Passengers receive a tracking number for each bag and can track its whereabouts using their smartphones. Should a bag be delayed, that tracking number is easily entered into baggage claim forms on Delta's website. The challenge for airlines such as Delta, which have begun or are considering self-tagging systems, is not capturing information or processing information, but protecting information. All airlines use bar codes on boarding passes, either printed from your home computer or from the check-in kiosk at the airport. An increasing number of airlines, including Delta, now send electronic boarding passes containing bar codes via email to passengers' smartphones to be scanned in place of bar codes on printed boarding passes. The U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) says that paperless boarding passes are more secure "and will prevent fraudulent paper boarding passes that could be created and printed at home." Why? Because instead of physically examining a printed copy of a boarding pass, TSA agents will scan the bar code on the electronic boarding pass to ensure its validity at the checkpoint. Passengers will still be required to show photo identification so officers can validate that the name on the boarding pass matches the name on the ID. Refer to WWYD Delta. Delta's real-time tracking of passengers' checked baggage is an example of:

A) raw data
B) information
C) first-mover advantage
D) Moore's law
E) an expert system