Airlines spend 100-200 dollars on every bag they lose. While they only lose 5 out of every 1,000 bags, that can sure add up over a year. The New York Times had a good story today about future RFID tags for luggage (I hate linking to sites that require registration and try to avoid it normally). The technology is there and in the long term would save the airlines money and it would save passengers a lot of hair pulling. For right now, however, none of them want to make that initial investment. RFID technology is scary to some, and when the proposal is to put RFID tags on kids I can understand. But this is an application of RFID technology I think we can all get behind.