Bag Manager

SITA Bag Manager is an on-airport baggage management and reconciliation system designed for airlines, airports, and ground handlers that need positive bag control from check-in through aircraft loading. The system scans every bag against its flight manifest as it moves through the sortation and loading process, verifying each item against flight parameters — departure time, aircraft type, destination, and passenger boarding status — to confirm correct loading before the aircraft departs.

The primary operational value is mishandling prevention at the point of loading rather than recovery after the fact. When a bag fails a parameter check — a passenger who no-showed, a connection too tight, a routing mismatch — Bag Manager flags the item and locates it precisely on the ramp (plane, ULD, or cart) to enable rapid offload without causing a departure delay. SITA reports a 20% reduction in mishandled bags for operators running the system.

Bag Manager handles both departure and arrival bags and tracks custody transfers between airlines and ground handlers, generating the full audit trail required by IATA Resolution 753. It is particularly relevant to high-frequency departure banks and large transit hubs where the cost of off-load delays and mis-sorted bags is magnified by the volume of movements. In GCC operations, where wide-body frequencies are high and single delayed off-load can cascade across a bank, the system's real-time locating capability directly reduces ground delay risk. The platform is hosted and monitored around the clock by SITA Global Services.