Suitcases that do more than just carry clothes
YOUR suitcase has taken on a life of its own. It can tell you if it has strayed too far, or if you’ve packed too much, and it soon may be able to call you an Uber car. There’s even a suitcase in the works that will ferry you through the airport.
Luggage has been a pretty sleepy product category, but now suitcases are getting a host of technical features.
Three types of features dominate this first wave of “smart luggage”. There are ports and chargers to repower a phone or other electronic device. There are GPS trackers that work with a cellphone to pinpoint your luggage’s location. There are also features focused on making travelling easier, like electronic baggage tags that allow customers to skip check-in lines at airports.
Bluesmart Luggage is so focused on the “smart” aspects of its offerings that it prefers to be called a technology company, its chief executive, Tomi Pierucci, said.
Bluesmart bags include a digital scale and GPS tracking. The suitcase can be locked by a cellphone app, and it automatically locks if it strays too far from the owner’s cellphone.
Pierucci wants to create an ecosystem to help people “avoid the pain in travel”, he said, by using the accompanying phone app as an online travel information hub.
Business travellers keep their suitcases an average of three years before buying a new one, Pierucci said, but Bluesmart’s software and firmware upgrades can deliver new features and new partnerships to customers as they are developed.
Stephanie Korey, a co-founder and the chief executive of the new luggage company Away, said she liked to call her suitcases “thoughtful”. The one-year-old company has already sold 75,000 pieces of luggage.
Korey said she and her partner, Jen Rubio, looked at solving customer problems, like recharging a dying phone, keeping smelly clothes away from clean ones or designing wheels that make it easy to roll over cobblestones. “We think about how people pack, what they do at the airport, what they do when they arrive at a hotel,” Korey said.
Other luggage-tech ideas include the Fugu Travel suitcase, which expands from carryon to full-size suitcase using an internal air pump.
Of course, the new features don’t appeal to all types of travellers. Greeley Koch, executive director of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, said businesspeople generally travelled with carry-on luggage only, “so the scale and GPS tracker aren’t really applicable”.
Still, said Julio Terra, Kickstarter’s director of technology and design, “people are clearly hungry for better products in this space” and should expect “a lot of innovation in this area for years to come”.