The International Air Transportation Association (IATA) is responsible for establishing standards to be applied in airports and by airlines.Reliable industry data shows that problems in baggage handling result in 42 million delayed or lost pieces of luggage at a cost of $3.8 billion to the airlines. The introduction of RFID for baggage handling can reduce the problems by at least 20%. RP1740C is the IATA standard that defines the requirements for applying RFID for baggage handling, including a set of mandatory and optional data. In addition, the optional data may be of variable length and support more than one flight. The RFID tag can therefore encode a rich set of data.