What Gordon Ramsay teaches us about baggage

What do cooking and baggage handling have in common? You need to have all your ingredients in the right place at the right time.

A good chef is always organised. All the ingredients are at hand, prepared and ready to be used before the cooking process begins. A poor chef realises that he needs to chop the onions once the pan is already on the stove. Then the process has to stop. It is the same in baggage handling. A good airport is planned and prepared for bags as they arrive. They already know which bags need attention first. A poor airport treats each arrival as a surprise.

IATA’s Baggage Improvement Program (BIP) has developed solutions to help airports and airlines reduce mishandling. One particular solution to help airports be prepared is the five S’s of baggage: sort, straighten, sweep, standardize and sustain. That way, time isn’t wasted looking for things, but instead spent on handling baggage.

For more info about BIP, visit www.iata.org/bip.