Aalborg Airport and Lyngsoe said in August 2026 that nearly two decades of joint work have produced a fully digitised baggage handling operation, covering every bag from check-in through to loading on the aircraft. The Danish airport handles around 1.6 million passengers a year, and the two organisations describe the system as a continuing build rather than a finished project.
Aalborg Airport sits at Nørresundby, about 6 km from the centre of Aalborg, and is Denmark’s third busiest airport behind Copenhagen and Billund. It is a compact operation, which is exactly why baggage reliability matters there: with little spare capacity in the hall, one stalled bag or one misread tag turns into a late departure quickly. Lyngsoe, headquartered at Aars in northern Jutland, supplies tracking systems to airports, postal and logistics operators and libraries.
Over nearly 20 years the airport has moved from manual processes with limited visibility to an automated operation with high traceability and control. The installation is integrated into the airport’s baggage handling system and includes RFID-based bag drops, sorting readers and automated baggage reconciliation during aircraft loading. Every baggage movement is recorded automatically and turned into validated data in real time.
“At Aalborg Airport, operational stability and passenger experience are fundamental. Our partnership with Lyngsoe has spanned almost 20 years and is built on trust, continuity, and a shared understanding of airport operations,” said Kim Bermann, Deputy Director and COO at Aalborg Airport.
Lyngsoe’s airport products run on its Lyngsoe LIVE Logistics platform. The company says its sortation reader “reads and singulates RFID bag tags and provides license plate data to the baggage handling system”, and that it can sit on the induction of the sorter or on the conveyor feeding it. Singulation is the part that does the heavy lifting: a reader in a busy hall will see several tags in its field at once, and the sorter has to know which licence plate belongs to the bag physically in front of it rather than the one behind it.
“By combining our Sort Allocation Controller with RFID tracking, we have helped Aalborg Airport move from manual processes to fully automated and data-driven baggage handling,” said Bastian Bech Hedegaard Gaardahl, Sales Director at Lyngsoe.
The case for reading bags by radio rather than by barcode comes down to read rate. A printed label has to present itself to a scanner in roughly the right orientation, and a bag tag folded under a handle or lying face down on the belt simply does not get read. IATA’s RFID bag tag fact sheet puts RFID read rates at 99 to 100 per cent and says the technology was picked “owing to the combination of reliability, maturity, widespread availability and cost”. Lyngsoe claims proven read rates of over 99 per cent in baggage handling. IATA’s own business case estimated a return of more than $3 billion to the industry from reduced mishandling and improved operational efficiency.
Two IATA documents sit underneath all of this. Resolution 753, effective from June 2018, requires members to track baggage when they take it from the passenger, when it is delivered to the aircraft, at custody changes between carriers and on delivery back to the passenger. Recommended Practice 1740c, titled “Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Specifications for Interline Baggage”, is the technical companion and points the industry at passive Class 1 Gen 2 tags, so that a bag tagged at one airport can be read at the next one.
The wider numbers are moving in the right direction. SITA’s 2026 Baggage IT Insights report, the 20th edition of that benchmark, found the mishandling rate fell 23 per cent year on year during 2025, with the total down to 24 million bags against 5 billion passengers carried. That still cost airlines an estimated $6.3 billion, or roughly $260 for every mishandled bag. SITA also reported that industry baggage tracking under Resolution 753 has passed the 50 per cent mark, with full compliance targeted for 2027.
Aalborg Airport and Lyngsoe list five results from the collaboration: increased capacity utilisation at check-in, faster self-service processes, reduced need for manual processing, higher system availability and operational stability, and real-time insight into baggage status.
