There is much to write about Africa and Internet technology, but I can not resist sharing about our luggage. We waited in line along with many others to provide information about the size and color of the missing bags. The agent entered the information and gave us a printout that was clearly from a decades-old system. We were told to give a call after twenty-four hours. I called after 26 hours and was told there was no update and that it could take up to five days. The reasoning was that there may not be room in the next few flights for “extra” baggage — the classic case of taking care of the new customers rather than upset them by helping customers who have already been disappointed. After continuing to get “there is no new information” I thought to myself that tracking luggage would be a great application for the web. I wondered if the airline had thought about it.
I visited South African Airways and at the bottom of the “After your trip” page was a link for “Lost/damaged luggage”. Could it be? I entered the file reference number from the printout and voila! Information about each of the four bags was displayed along with the status. As the day went on the status changed from “No information available” to “Arrived at airport” to “Delivery process underway”. It took thirty-six hours to get the luggage but I was impressed with how South African Airways had integrated a very old application with a user-friendly web front end. Apparently the people at the airport are not aware of it. The airline could certainly take some anxiety away and offload an extremely busy call center by informing their customers about the web application and including the url on the printout. The ideal solution would be to have the application automatically generate an SMS text message to your mobile phone every hour with the status.