LONDON (AP) – Airport lines are long and lost luggage piles up. It will be a chaotic summer for travelers in Europe.
Liz Morgan arrived at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport 4 and a half hours before her flight to Athens, and found the security line leaving the terminal and entering a large store along a road before of bending back inside the main building.
“There are old people in the queues, there are children, babies. No water, nothing. No signage, no help, no toilets, “said Morgan, who is from Australia and had tried to save time on Monday by registering online and carrying only a handbag.
People “couldn’t go to the bathroom because if they got out of the queue, they would lose their place,” he said.
After two years of pandemic restrictions, demand for travel has risen, but airlines and airports that cut jobs during the depths of the COVID-19 crisis are struggling to keep up. With the busy summer tourism season underway in Europe, passengers are facing chaotic scenes at airports, such as long delays, canceled flights and lost luggage headaches.
Schiphol, the busiest airport in the Netherlands, is slashing flights, saying there are thousands of airline seats a day above the capacity that security personnel can handle. Dutch company KLM apologized for stranding passengers there this month. It could be months before Schiphol has enough staff to ease the pressure, Air France-KLM chief executive Ben Smith said on Thursday.
London Gatwick and Heathrow Airports are asking airlines to limit the number of flights. Discount company easyJet is ruling out thousands of summer flights to avoid last-minute cancellations in response to limits on Gatwick and Schiphol. U.S. airlines have written to Ireland’s chief transport officer demanding urgent action to deal with “significant delays” at Dublin airport.
Nearly 2,000 flights from major continental European airports were canceled for a week this month, with Schiphol accounting for almost 9%, according to aviation consultancy Cirium. A further 376 flights were canceled from UK airports, and Heathrow accounted for 28%, Cirium said.
It’s a similar story in the United States, where airlines canceled thousands of flights for two days last week due to bad weather just as the summer tourist crowds are growing.
“In the vast majority of cases, people are traveling,” said Julia Lo Bue-Said, CEO of Advantage Travel Group, which represents some 350 UK travel agencies. But airports are understaffed and it takes much longer to process security clearances for newly hired workers, he said.
“They’re all creating bottlenecks in the system,” and it also means “when things go wrong, they go drastically wrong,” he said.
The Biden administration, which eliminates COVID-19 testing for people entering the U.S., is giving additional impetus to the accumulated demand for transatlantic travel. Bue-Said said his group’s agents reported an increase in reservations in the United States after the rule was dropped this month.
For American travelers in Europe, the strengthening of the dollar against the euro and the pound is also a factor, as hotels and restaurants are more affordable.
At Heathrow, a sea of unclaimed luggage covered the floor of a terminal last week. The airport on Monday blamed technical errors on the baggage system and called on airlines to reduce flights to two terminals by 10%, affecting about 5,000 passengers.
“A number of passengers” may have traveled without their luggage, the airport said.
When cookbook writer Marlena Spieler returned to London from Stockholm this month, it took three hours to pass passport control.
Spieler, 73, spent at least another hour and a half trying to find his luggage in the luggage area, which “was a mental hospital, with piles of suitcases everywhere.”
He almost gave up, before seeing his bag on a carousel. He has another trip planned to Greece in a few weeks, but is worried about returning to the airport.
“Frankly, I’m scared for my well-being. Am I strong enough to put up with that?” Spieler said by email.
In Sweden, security lines at Stockholm Arlanda Airport have been so long this summer that many passengers have arrived more than five hours before boarding time. So many are showing up early that officials are rejecting passengers arriving more than three hours before the flight to ease congestion.
Despite some improvements, the line to one of the checkpoints was extended more than 100 meters (328 feet) on Monday.
Four young Germans, nervous about missing their flight to Hamburg while waiting to check in their bags, asked the other passengers if they could jump to the front of the line. Once there, they bought quick passes to avoid the long safety queue.
Lina Wiele, 19, said she had not seen the same level of chaos at other airports, “I guess not,” before rushing into the freeway lane.
Thousands of pilots, cabin crew, baggage handlers and other aviation workers were fired during the pandemic, and now there is not enough to cope with the rise in travel.
“Some airlines are struggling because I think they were hoping to recover staffing levels faster than they could have done,” said Willie Walsh, head of the International Air Transport Association.
The shortage of staff after the pandemic is not unique to the airline industry, Walsh said at the airline group’s annual meeting in Qatar this week.
“What makes it difficult for us is that many of the jobs cannot be operated remotely, so airlines have not been able to offer the same flexibility to their staff as other airlines,” he said. “Pilots must be present to operate the aircraft, cabin crew must be present, we must have people carrying bags and helping passengers.”
Fired aviation workers “have found new jobs with higher wages, more stable contracts,” said Joost van Doesburg of the FNV union, which represents the majority of staff at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. . “And now everyone wants to travel again,” but workers don’t want to work at the airport.
The CEO of the economic airline Ryanair, the largest airline in Europe, warned that flight delays and cancellations would continue “during the summer”. Passengers should expect a “less-than-satisfying experience,” Michael O’Leary told Sky News.
Some European airports have not yet seen major problems, but they are being prepared. Prague’s Vaclav Havel International Airport expects the number of passengers to increase next week and until July, “when we could experience a shortage of staff, especially at security checks,” spokeswoman Klara Diviskova said.
The airport still has a few “dozens of staff” despite a recruitment campaign, he said.
Labor disputes are also causing problems.
In Belgium, Brussels Airlines said a three-day strike from Thursday would force the cancellation of some 315 flights and affect some 40,000 passengers.
Two days of strike action have affected Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport this month, one by security staff and another by airport staff who say wages are not keeping pace with inflation. A quarter of the flights were canceled on the second day.
Some Air France pilots are threatening a strike on Saturday, warning that crew fatigue is threatening flight safety, although Smith, the airline’s chief executive, said he was not expected to disrupt operations. . Airport staff are promising another pay-related strike on July 1.
However, airport problems are unlikely to deter people from flying, said Jan Bezdek, a spokesman for the Czech travel agency CK Fischer, which has sold more holiday packages so far this year. than before the pandemic.
“What we can see is that people can’t bear to wait to travel after the pandemic,” Bezdek said. “Any problem at airports can hardly change that.”
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Corder reported from The Hague. AP journalists Aleksandar Furtula in Amsterdam, Karel Janicek in Prague, Karl Ritter in Stockholm, Angela Charlton in Paris, Samuel Petrequin in Brussels and David Koenig in Dallas contributed.