Luggage cart tracking

RFiD Discovery's Luggage Cart Tracking System improves the management of luggage carts at airports and in travel environments.

Benefits

Optimizes utilization of carts

Faster cart collection thanks to visibility of understocked areas

Cart pool size can be optimized to reduce capital expenditure and associated maintenance costs

Builds a maintenance history for each cart

Airports are doing what they can to attract more passengers through their gates. The more passengers that pass through an airport, the greater the airport's revenue. Many factors will affect an individual's choice of airport, one of which will be the overall customer experience and the availability of luggage carts is seen by many as a good indicator of how well an airport is taking care of them.

Providing luggage carts in the right place at the right time can significantly enhance customer experience

RFiD Discovery is a low-cost, high impact solution to support luggage cart management teams, ensuring availability across the airport estate. Fitting luggage carts with an RFiD Discovery system supports the efficient management of carts by monitoring the build-up, dispersal, and flow of carts around the retail area or airport to provide a live view of cart availability and real-time alerts of cart shortages.

By highlighting areas where luggage carts are left, it supports efficient retrieval or redistribution. The system also delivers valuable data about customer movements by recording the total time spent in-store or in a particular area, for example queuing at the till.

In addition, individually identifying carts enables organizations to build a history of utilization including the number of trips or approximate distance traveled and detect any under or over usage of particular carts. It also helps determine whether there are too many carts and if the pool size can be reduced.

How does luggage cart tracking work?

Each cart is fitted with a tracking tag (either passive RFID, BLE or UWB), which is discretely placed so that it is protected from cart contents and users remain unaware of it. Passive RFID tags do not have batteries and do not need to be maintained.

RFID antennas are installed at luggage cart collection points and other areas where they tend to be left as well as significant gateways such as entrance doors.

Information collected by the readers is sent back to the central RFiD Discovery database which can be interfaced with other systems to create alerts or provide data for analysis.

Pilot project to track luggage carts at Heathrow

RFiD Discovery has successfully completed a three-month pilot project to track the movements of luggage cart at Heathrow Airport in England to improve luggage cart management and demand forecasting.

At the heart of the project was the monitoring of luggage cart movements into and out of the baggage reclaim area at the airport’s terminal 4. Having established that the solution provides the desired data, Heathrow is now looking at how to roll out the solution across its terminals.

For the pilot project, each of the approximately 2,000 luggage carts at terminal 4 were fitted with a passive RFID label, placed so that it was protected from the contents of the trolley and users remained unaware of it. RFID readers were installed at all entrances and exits to the baggage reclaim area to detect if any carts entered or left the area.

"Providing luggage trolleys in the right place at the right time can significantly enhance passenger experience. The data collected by the system will enable our forecasting teams to improve modelling tools, so the replenishment process can be planned more effectively. In addition, live data of stock levels will warn the trolley management teams if cart numbers in key areas are getting low."

Ben Wagenaar, Innovation Technologist at Heathrow