Designing an efficient self tagging bag tag

Designing an appropriate bag tag for self tagging is not a difficult task if you understand what are the drivers of efficiency. The most important concept is to keep it as simple as possible. I will illustrate this in the following article and give simple guidelines.
Current bag tags have been designed to be applied by agents. This means that all the features have been thought of to improve the process at the time of their design. This bag tag design had also to meet the constraints of automated bag sortation.

The regular bag tag
This bag tag is more complex that one would think.
The claim tag. The claim is a piece of detachable paper that is handed to the passenger once the bags are accepted by the airline.
The stubs. At the other end of the bag tag are the stubs : 1 to 3 stubs. Stubs are used in the makeup area to locate the bags in the ULD (Unit Load Device, a type of container). The staff that loads the bags in the ULDs has a sheet of paper representing that ULD. He sticks a stub at the place where the bag is physically placed in the ULD. This allows to find a bag quickly in case of unload. The rest of the front face of the bag tag is used to displays 1 D barcodes placed in "T", destination airport, flight number,… The length is determined by the number of travel legs that must fit in the bag tag. As an example, the CUSS (Common Use Self Service) bag tag is 21" long. The back of the bag tag bears legal writing describing the limitation of responsibility of the airline, the procedure to follow in case of bag mishandling,…
The type of paper has been defined to be compliant with the technology : thermal printing, glue performance and resistance to tear to avoid rip out in the BHS. The technical details are listed in IATA documents (www.iata.org).

The self-tagging bag tag
Before starting designing the bag tag you need to determine what are the constraints you need to comply with.
Here are some of the questions you need to answer:
Will this bag tag be used in interline / multi segment journeys ?
Do you need compatibility between agent bag tags and self tagging bag tags ?
Do you need compatibility with automated sortation systems (BHS) ?
Do you need to be IATA compliant ?
Do you need to be compliant with current printing technology ?

Then you can start with a blank sheet. Compatibility with existing printing technology will determine the width and the way information is written on the tag, i.e. thermal printing. Why the width ? Because current dedicated printers are configured to manage two width of paper : boarding pass width (usually referred to as ATB format) and bag tag width. Introducing a third width would require to mechanically adjust the printers, a costly option that must be balanced with the benefits you expect from that new width.
So now you have a blank strip of thermal paper. How do you want passengers to attach it on the bag ? the current system requires to peel a liner at the back of the tag on a limited portion of the tag and to fold the tag to stick one end to the other. This is THE core of the issue. Passengers need to understand how to stick and if possible do it in a short period of time. Otherwise you create frustration and anxiety. What is not natural in the current process is that you do not peel the bag tag completely from one end to the other. The liner stays in place. This design has been chosen to reduce the amount of waste at the counter but this is not intuitive for a passenger : when we apply a label in other situations, we remove the liner completely. It is easier to reuse existing passenger reflex rather than trying to train them to manipulate a air transportation tag differently from a regular tag : If you choose to have a sticky bag tag, you need to make a stop mark (this is a pre-cut in the liner) that will allow the passenger to throw away the portion he has peeled.
You can also decide to design a different way of attaching the bag tag to the bag. Make sure in any case that you do not need to train your passengers on a counter-intuitive behavior, i.e. to generate a behavior that is opposite to common sense such as peeling only a third of a label to attach it.
When creating a new attachment design, do not be obsessed to address 100you’re your passengers. If you find a revolutionary process that applies to 80% of them, this is very good. Optimizing 80% of the flow is not a failure ! The other 20%, will be handled differently, for example at a counter. To manage the situation operationally, you need to clearly explain to passengers whether they can use process A or need to go use process B (for example seeking assistance from an agent).
Now, you have a blank strip of paper that can be printed by existing printers and attached to a bag. How do you make it easy for your passengers to attach it ? A natural behavior is to remove all the sticky parts and try and find a place for them. In this respect, keeping the stubs is not a good option. In the best case, passengers will ignore them or stick them on their boarding pass. But the most likely to happen is to have them stick the stubs on their bags as a back up. This was an agent practice. But the result is disastrous in the BHS. Not the first time you stick the stub, but when that same bag is injected for a different trip, with a different bag tag number… and the old stub is still on it. The automated barcode readers in the BHS will read the bag tag in most of the situations, but in some cases they can read the stub, which will correspond to no bag. The BHS will send the bag to the manual sortation unit(where the sortation process is longer) with a possibility to generate a mishandling. So, if possible remove the stubs from your self tagging bag tag and adapt the process in the makeup area accordingly. The second detachable part is the claim. In fact the claim should be given only when the bag is no longer in the hand of the passenger, that means injected in the BHS. The easiest way to achieve this, is to print the claim at the bag drop station, be it manned of self-service. Now you have a bag tag.
Can you make it easier to place ? Yes. Remember the back of the bag tag : we have not used it so far. In regular bag tags, there is all the legal writing. Most of the airlines and airports that use self tagging have removed this legal writing. If your company still require it, think about printing it on the screen of your tagging station with an accept button. You can now use the back to show a couple drawings on how to attach the tag. Try as much as you can to avoid text, because your passengers will not necessarily feel comfortable with the words you use if it is not their mother tongue.

Further optimization
The self-service bag tag will fit into a self service tagging station. The most obvious tagging station is the kiosk with a bag tag printer. You have two options for fitting the tags in the kiosks : roll or fan fold. The benefit of rolls is that whatever the length of the bag tag, the roll can be adapted to fit in the kiosk. The benefit of fan fold is that in a small space you can fit many more bag tags. Current rolls, include 200 bag tags, whereas a typical fan fold box is 700 to 1000 bag tags. This box is approximately 20 cm high. When self tagging develops, you can expect over 200 bag tags will be printed per day and per kiosk. This means that rolls need to be changed every day, but not necessarily at the same time of the day. You can decide to change them all at the same time, and throw away the reminder of the roll or ask agents to change rolls when needed. The practicality of both options will depend on the staffing level of the check-in area. The more staff, the less difficult it is to change rolls when needed. But to really improve operations, increasing the number of tags per kiosk is key. Using fan fold allows to improve autonomy, but it requires to adapt the length of the tag to the available space. Fitting a 21" (CUSS length) bag tag is unlikely to be possible in an existing kiosk, but if you are considering a dedicated tag, designing it short enough to fit should be part of the initial constraints. Another option is to have multiple rolls in the kiosk. Doing so, not only do you reduce the frequency of roll change but you can chose when you refill.

Implementation
The impact of new design is large. It is not just your tag supplier that will have to supply new tags. The IT department must impact the check in application and the printers. In the check-in application, one point is particularly crucial : inactivation of the bag tag. We will discuss this in a future article.
The printers need to be updated because in current printing information flow is split in two : one flow for the layout and one flow for the information itself. This is a remnant of the times when network bandwidth was scarce : just passing the information allowed to reduce the time of transfer. So the printers require a new layout that is called a "pectab".

Other options for self service bag tags
Designing a sticky paper bag tag printable in airports is not the only option. You can decide to implement home printed bag tags. Many discussions go around this. The starting point is to say that all passengers have access to a printer, so they could print their bag tag on regular paper. That bag tag would then be attached to the bag using a plastic envelope. There are two difficulties : distribution of the plastic envelope to the passengers and ensuring high read rate in the BHS. The characteristic of the plastic is that it creates reflection when the laser beam impacts it. This reduces the read rate and can increase mishandled bag rate. Distributing the plastic envelope can be done at the airport or via mail, but if it is not reused, economics won't work : on top of the material itself, there is a handling cost : delivery to airports, storage in airports, distribution to passengers.
Another option is permanent RFID bag tags. This is not about adding an RFID chip to the existing paper bag tags. This is a new concept : a rigid plastic card fitted with an UHF RFID chip (for description of RFID in baggage see the dedicated article). This tag, is a plastic card, such as the frequent flyer cards. The chip in the card stores an identifier of the passenger. Passengers attach that card to their bag using a strap. When they go to the airport, they go to a dedicated bag drop position where an agent reads the tag. If the BHS is not equipped with RFID readers (most frequent case) the bag is retagged with a bar coded bag tag. The passenger identifier can be his frequent flyer number or any other reference that is known by the airline's system. The benefit of the RFID bag tag is the high convenience for the passenger : no need to stop at a kiosk or at a counter to print a bag tag. This is by far the quickest and less troublesome process. A plastic RFID bag tag costs 10 to 20 times the cost of a paper bag tag and the process requires some modifications of the bag drop area. But this permanent tag allows to reduce the use of disposable bag tags and increases strongly customer satisfaction.
So what should you do ? Implementing self tagging is not risky nor a bet and it is a prerequisite to implementing self service bag drop. Where it has been implemented, it works and customer satisfaction has raised. In the current state of technology, a good decision could be to implement self tagging based on paper bag tags printed at the airport, coupled with permanent RFID bag tags for frequent flyers.