How DXB only mishandles two bags per 1,000 passengers and the secret underground system behind it

Dubai: Dubai International Airport (DXB) has already handled more than 63 million bags this year. Yet despite the staggering volume, the airport and the baggage team delivers an astonishing 99.8 per cent accuracy rate, just two mishandled bags for every thousand passengers. The global industry standard, by comparison, is 6.3 for every 1,000 passengers. How does one of the busiest airports in the world beat those odds? Is it cutting-edge technology no other hub can match? Artificial intelligence (AI)? A fully automated process? DXB has all of that but the real secret lies elsewhere.

At the heart of the operation is John Dyett, Vice President of Baggage Service Delivery at Dubai Airports. But even he insists the credit belongs to more than just advanced systems or a single leader.

“The principal reason why we are world class at baggage handling at DXB is the team that we have here,” Dyett told Gulf News during an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of Terminal 3’s (T3) vast baggage tunnels. “We have a team of experts across the whole baggage community who work seamlessly together to ensure that our customers have the best experience ever at Dubai. So, really, the biggest, most important factor is the team working together, using their expertise, using their knowledge to ensure that everybody gets their bag.”

It all plays out in a hidden world no passenger ever gets to see. While travellers walk from the plane to immigration and wait by the carousel, beneath their feet stretches a sprawling subterranean ecosystem - a labyrinth of tunnels, conveyor belts, and sorting systems. To the uninitiated, it feels endless.

For the thousands of workers who navigate it 24/7, it is the beating heart of DXB’s rare efficiency, an underground city where nearly every bag finds its rightful passenger. The DXB success story lies in its team, something major international airports simply cannot duplicate.

Inside the control room: The nerve centre of DXB’s baggage world

Deep underground T3 sits the baggage control room - the beating heart of DXB’s baggage operation. It is here that the scale and precision of the airport’s vast underground network come to life on giant screens filled with data, diagrams, and live video feeds.

At the front, two massive screens dominate the room. One displays a skeletal map of the entire baggage handling system (BHS) in T3 - 140 km of conveyors visualised as coloured lines, each representing the flow of luggage. Green means smooth sailing, yellow signals congestion, and red indicates a fault that needs immediate attention.

On the day of the tour, the diagram glowed almost entirely green, with only a few faint yellow and red lines breaking the rhythm.

Next to it, another screen shows live CCTV footage of bags snaking through the system in real time, alongside constantly updating numbers - arrivals, departures and the total bags that have moved through T3 since the day’s first flights at 5am. It is a dashboard that looks less like an airport monitor and more like a scoreboard - proof of the airport’s relentless pace.

“Dnata looks after the product - the bags, and our Engineering Services team and Vanderlande look after the system,” Dyett explained.

The figures are staggering. On September 24 (the day of the tour), a relatively quiet day in the travel calendar, the dashboard showed around 4,000 bags moving through T3 in the past hour.

“On a busy day, that number climbs to 16,000 an hour,” Dyett said. “The screen already displays more than 30,000 bags processed since early in the morning. On peak travel periods, departures alone could hit 120,000, with arrivals adding another 60,000. In total, DXB’s baggage system moves close to a quarter of a million bags every day, and two-thirds of that comes through T3.”

Elsewhere in the room, one operator sits at a desk surrounded by three monitors. On one of his screens, an alert pops up - a single bag has gone off-track out of more than 30,000 handled that day. His task now requires tracing it and coordinating with staff on the ground to return it to the right aircraft. Watching this in real time brings the statistics into sharp focus, the system doesn’t just track numbers, it actively intervenes to keep mishandled bags at an industry low.

Even during so-called quiet periods, DXB is anything but calm. In 2024, the airport handled a record 92.3 million passengers, extending its decade-long run as the world’s busiest international hub. For the control room team, there is no such thing as downtime, only the constant movement of bags, each one destined to reunite with its owner.

Arrivals: The race beneath the carousels

Step outside the control room and you find yourself directly beneath the carousels of T3. Above, hundreds of passengers from Emirates flights, arriving from Paris, Washington DC, and dozens of other cities, wait anxiously for their luggage. Below, the real action unfolds. Bags are dropped onto conveyor belts, scanned, sorted, and fed into the system that will deliver them upstairs. For the baggage handling team, this is a race against time.

“About 91 per cent of all bags across DXB get to the passengers in 45 minutes,” explained John Dyett. “That means from the moment the aircraft stops, passengers disembark, clear passport control, and arrive at the carousel, their luggage is already waiting.”

It’s an impressive benchmark on its own but what makes it remarkable is that around 70 per cent of the bags processed at DXB are transfers, a logistical puzzle that few airports in the world face at this scale.

Standing in the arrivals hall’s underbelly, Dyett gestures to the network around him.

“Right now, we are underneath the carousels at T3. Over here, the bags are offloaded, and each one goes through a scanner that reads the barcode on the tag. The scanner captures the exact time, so we know when that bag entered the system and from there it goes through security before making its way upstairs. This area alone feeds 14 carousels in T3.”

That timestamp is the metric the team relies on to calculate performance and ensure the 45-minute delivery target is consistently met. Oversized baggage is diverted to a separate section, where lifts carry it up to dedicated carousels.

The scale can be overwhelming. “Our busiest day this year was around April 5 and 6, [during Eid Al Fitr and the spring break],” Dyett recalled. “On the April 6, we handled more than 60,000 arrival bags in T3 alone. That was the first time we’d seen that number in arrivals.”

In the rare event a bag doesn’t appear on the carousel? Passengers must report it to their airline, which then triggers a global recovery process designed to reunite the luggage with its owner, wherever in the world it may be.

The future of baggage: Machines may move bags, but people keep them moving

For all its advanced technology, sprawling conveyor belts, and AI-driven systems, the true secret behind DXB’s baggage success isn’t hidden in its machines, it’s in its people. Beneath the airport’s vast terminals, thousands of workers keep the system alive, ensuring not only that bags arrive on time but that they arrive undamaged.

“I think there will always be human interaction,” said John Dyett. “It will change over time but even 20 or 30 years down the line, with robotics, automation, and driverless vehicles, you will still need people to oversee and guide the process. Baggage operation is dynamic, you can’t programme everything. You have to react before anything happens. Here, we react the moment the bag arrives. There will always be a need for people.”

Dyett knows this from experience. After years working at Heathrow, he joined Dubai Airports in 2015 and has just marked a decade at DXB. For him, the future is not just about systems and statistics but about the team he leads every day.

“My plan is to continue working with this amazing team at DXB, carry on delivering the best performance for our passengers, and enjoying my life in Dubai,” he said. “We also need to start preparing over the next five years, for an even larger operation at Dubai World Central - Al Maktoum International (DWC).”

Standing above ground, it’s easy for travellers to take their suitcase for granted. To roll it out the door and into a taxi without a second thought. Below the surface lies an entire ecosystem, a hidden world of machines and people working together to make sure that happens seamlessly.

At the heart of it all is a paradox - the future may belong to automation but the soul of baggage handling at the world’s busiest international airport will always remain human.