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The Internet of Never Lost Luggage: Airfi and LugTrack Lock It Down

By Cynthia S. Artin January 30, 2018

The global market for luggage and related accessories has experienced exponential growth over the past few decades, as consumers are traveling further and more frequently given competitive fares resulting in unprecedented travel deals.

The luggage market is now valued at over $30B annually and growing.

Luggage locks as a segment of this spend has undergone the highest levels of year over year growth, with security and peace of mind becoming a valued commodity by consumers.

Travelers love their bags and will pay premium prices for the product ranges offered by premium brands. Secondly and more importantly, not only do travelers love their bags, they love what is inside them.

The most innovative luggage brands are providing RFID security embedded into travel accessories, warranty replacement services for lost bags, ID tracking, and more. This approach has begun to solidify the traveller’s relationship with their luggage brand. 

Brands always serve to differentiate the experience of their consumers and with the introduction of global luggage trackers, have provided and innovative means by which luggage companies may maintain a communication channel with their customers after the point of sale. They are introducing luggage as connected things on the IoT.

The Tumi Global Locator is a perfect example of an innovative product that fully complies with FAA regulations regarding Personal Electronic Devices, that ensures peace of mind and puts the traveler in control of their journey. The consumer has invested in a brand’s premium product and the brand has gone above and beyond to ensure the safety of their consumer’s purchase as well as the contents therein.

Landing in San Francisco and receiving a notification that your bags have arrived with you is the first reassuring signal – your bags made it too!

Being notified at the baggage carousel that your bag is now near you is also cool.

Being at a meeting during the day, knowing that you will be alerted if someone enters your hotel room and moves your bag, provides peace of mind.

Should the worst happen and you’re separated from your belongings, being able to show the airline exactly where your bags have ended up puts the power into the consumer’s hands.

The ongoing relationship between the luggage brand and their consumer in this context, ensures loyalty and not only customer satisfaction, but a significantly higher probability of ongoing sales of related products and accessories.

Luggage brands are all keen to bring their own tracker experience to market, but to date have been challenged by the complexities of building these devices. In effect, moving away from their core business they have lacked expertise in consumer electronics and cellular technologies and for the most part struggled to build a truly compelling out of the box experience that can be sold throughout all their sales channels.

LugTrack and Airfi have developed a solution that addresses all of these challenges.

The LugTrack Locator, alongside Airfi’s Catalyst IoT platform is a “Full Stack Solution” that provides all the components that a luggage brand would need to launch their own global tracker. Through a fully customizable application, platform device and managed global connectivity solution, luggage brands can enter the market with minimal effort and start to evolve their product range into the Internet of Things world.

The device is a slick global tracking device with a battery life that will last for those long trips, along with a simple easy to use application. Through Airfi’s Catalyst IoT platform, the SIM card in the device allows global network access with a range of charging options to allow for devices to be sold in any retail store with connectivity included, or purchased separately for a month, year or even individual trips as needed.

The result is simple – luggage and premium accessory brands are now able to launch their own branded tracking solution, minimize the cost and effort of going to market, and monetizing their customers with an effective, out of the box experience that creates security and peace of mind for the “connected traveler.” 




Edited by Ken Briodagh
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Contributing Writer

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