British Airlines Reinvents The Luggage Tag With E-Ink Display & NFC

Sticky paper luggage tags have been with us for ages, the way they work is simple, after you check-in the airline personnel print a tag that has barcode information along with your details that is to be attached to your luggage. But this procedure increases your waiting time and not to mention wastes huge amounts of paper as once your journey is over you almost immediately tear them and throw them in the bin. So in an effort to make the humble luggage tag reusable Britsh Airways have sought the help of Densitron Displays and Designworks Windsor to develop a reusable E-Ink display luggage tag with NFC.


As you can see above the tag is divided into two parts, the smaller part displays the flight information and the larger part has the barcode. Once the user completes the check-in procedure at the airport he can use his smartphone to transfer the flight details and barcode information to the luggage tag via NFC. This will hugely benefit frequent flyers who do not have to reattach a new tag every time they fly, they can simply update the information of their next flight in their existing tag. The British Airways will be testing this new service at the Heathrow airport starting next month. Even if it is a brilliant thought, the makers of this technology forgot one thing; the most popular smartphone in the world, the iPhone does not have NFC.

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