I hate checking luggage; I think most frequent travelers do. The advent of AirTags and airline apps that track your checked bag through all the steps in the journey have helped make the process of finding lost luggage much smoother, but checking is still a last resort for me.
It's because I fly from an airport that's not a hub, so odds are I'm facing a layover. We all know layovers are when those checked suitcases fall off the conveyor belts and little transit buggies, and that's how the bag you thought was going to Phoenix ends up in Honolulu and tl;dr, you're buying underwear from the hotel gift shop.
So my ears perked up at this NPR story I heard yesterday: "Inside ATL: How Delta juggles 100,000 bags a day at the world's busiest airport."
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is always named top of the lists of the world's busiest airports, and Delta Air Lines is the largest operation at the airport, handling, as the headline of the story says, more than 100,000 bags a day.
While bag-scanning operations are a lot more sophisticated and efficient, it turns out that typically, the ramp agents who ferry checked luggage from plane to plane schedule their own routes to get bags to their final plane. So an agent might need to pick up suitcases bound for Cancun from, let's say, four arriving planes — all at different gates of course arriving at different times — and get them to the flight to Cancun before it takes off. He or she needs to factor in all the other drivers whizzing around the ramp, navigate delays, figure out which plane to head to first, all of it.
This is where AI comes in, and I think the application Delta is using here is fascinating: Its AI system works like a rideshare algorithm, figuring out the most efficient routes for tug drivers to take to pick up and deliver bags from connecting planes to the final plane. Drivers don't need to spend time figuring that out themselves.
Delta says the new system has improved baggage transfer success by 20%, and it has plans to roll it out at other airports.
What's important to note here — and why I think there are takeaways here for the hotel side of the travel business — is that this AI improvement didn't eliminate the need for people and what they bring to the job; instead, it's helping with one of the more tricky, slightly annoying and out-of-control elements of their jobs.
I'm sure we could all identify elements of our daily tasks that fit that description. And my guess is that it's not always the mission-critical elements of our job, but more often than not the annoying elements.
Even Sam Altman, the CEO of AI giant OpenAI, said this week that AI really isn't leading to the "jobs apocalypse," claiming jobs, as he once thought.
Here in the hospitality industry, we could have told you that.
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