Today’s pandemonium at Heathrow Airport has been compounded by travelers’ continued struggles with luggage recovery.
As flights from Amsterdam, Canada, and India landed at Terminals 2 and 3, a sea of bags spilled out over the airport, and officials reportedly apologized to worried passengers by saying, “Sorry, the whole industry is in a mess.”
When consumers have already arrived home and may not be aware that their luggage is at reclaim, one traveler who was at the airport yesterday questioned whether it was “safe and secure” to leave customers’ “days old baggage” there.
Another traveler who was at Heathrow reported bags scattered across the hall and people hopingly waiting at conveyer belts for their luggage to arrive.
Check-in delays, flight delays, and baggage problems have plagued airports for months in the UK, which experts attribute to a general lack of workers in the sector.
The announcement comes as thousands of British Airways employees, including engineers and cabin personnel, have vowed to cause even more mayhem in airports and airlines over the summer vacation.
Over 16,000 employees are being asked by unions if they want to join the more than 700 BA employees who have already agreed to walk out in protest over pay at Heathrow Airport throughout the summer.
One of the problems with hiring in the UK, according to Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary, is that “British people don’t want to be baggage handlers,” he claimed yesterday, adding that his Irish airline has not experienced the same problems.
Nick Dixon, a correspondent for ITV’s Good Morning Britain, arrived at Heathrow’s Terminal 3 from Amsterdam to see stacks of luggage at arrivals.
“Sorry, the whole industry is in a mess,” staff just commented as Mr. Dixon was trying to find his lost suitcase.
My luggage, which is in another area of Heathrow with thousands of other goods, has not yet been reunited with me, according to fellow GMB employee Kieron Clarke. Staff can’t get to them, unfortunately.
Even worse, due to a staffing shortage in the UK, those items are now being moved from London to Amsterdam for processing.
CBC Parliamentary Bureau reporter Ashley Burke also tweeted that the plan had been delayed by 10 minutes when she arrived, but security had been cleared in just 15 minutes. Despite not having checked a bag, she reported seeing “scattered [luggage] everywhere in the baggage claim area.”
“[I] arrived 12:28 from Australia into @HeathrowAirport,” one consumer from that country wrote. My bag’s journey from the plane to the baggage claim area has taken longer than the flight from France to the gate.
Another individual tweeted that they had to wait an hour for a shuttle bus to Terminal 5 and pleaded with the airport to provide more shuttles immediately since many were missing connections.
Another client complained that Heathrow Airport was a terrible mess. The only consolation is that British Airways planes always appear to be delayed, even after waiting for more than an hour (and counting) for a terminal bus transfer.
Today, a TUI representative was observed informing travelers that their flight to Palma has been delayed by 12 hours. Then, as more troubled travelers waited to check in and drop off their luggage at other airlines including Pegasus and TUI, customers were seen sitting on floors at Manchester Airport to wait out the delay in another airline issue.
At the airports in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Birmingham, and Bristol, travelers endured lengthy lines yesterday as well. Many airports specialists have identified the main problem as post-Covid recruitment.
According to the Telegraph, Ryanair, which is primarily located in Dublin and London Stanstead Airports, looks to have mainly avoided harm from the incident.
In comparison to British Airways, which had 142 cancellations out of 13,010 flights between May 7 and June 6, the low-cost carrier had just three (0.02%) during the same period. EasyJet, on the other hand, cancelled 636 (3.87%) out of 16,425 flights.
Ryanair, which is situated in Dublin, Ireland, employs 19,000 people from all across Europe.
Its CEO has largely laid the blame for other airlines like BA and easyJet needing to cancel flights on Europe’s rigid labor market.
According to Mr. O’Leary, Ryanair has been “totally unharmed” since, in contrast to some other airlines, it anticipated the rebound ‘early.’
I’m not running for reelection on Brexit, he continued, but the UK will need to figure out a way to open up the labor market between the UK and Europe in order to bring people in to do the tasks that, quite frankly, British people don’t want to do.
“They don’t want to pick fruit,” the statement continued. “They don’t want to work in agriculture. They don’t want to work in hospitality.
In contrast to BA, Ryanair is not “dependent” on UK labor, according to John Grant, chief analyst at global travel data supplier OAG.
EasyJet has access to a wider choice of labor, but the majority of its bases are in significant Western European nations that have comparable resource problems with the UK.
“Ryanair has a far wider variety of bases across the entire continent of Europe and during the pandemic retained a higher percentage of its workers in certain of those bases, particularly in Eastern Europe,” the airline said.
Ryanair is also a “uncomplicated” airline with one aircraft, the Boeing 737, and short-haul European routes, according to Gilbert Ott, the creator of the travel advice website God Save the Points.
I don’t think many people realize how many weeks it takes to get employees through the necessary safety tests to resume flying, especially pilots, he added.
Additionally, European nations were the first to announce a busy summer of restrictions-free travel, which provided Ryanair plenty of room to expand and play an active role.
According to Mr. O’Leary, his pilots and cabin crew members were flying “far ahead of the predicted recovery,” even though they must fly every month to keep their licenses.
Cabin crew members must undergo an eight-week retraining period if their working hours expire.
We made sure to send up pilots and cabin crew, even on aircraft without any passengers, he continued.
At least once per month, we sent everyone flying. We didn’t leave them all behind and promise to call you after 18 months, when everything is over.
As of yesterday, Ryanair cabin crew employees in Belgium, France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain began a three-day walkout. This could cause delays for travelers returning to the United Kingdom.
The work stoppage had the most effect in Belgium, forcing the biggest budget airline in Europe to cancel 127 flights between Friday and Sunday to and from Charleroi Airport in Brussels.
According to a representative for Brussels South Charleroi Airport, Ryanair could only guarantee 30 to 40 percent of its regularly scheduled flights at the airport.
Mr. O’Leary responded by saying that the cabin crew, who make between £24,000 and £45,000 per year, are “delighted” to be working again post-Covid.
Everyone can afford to pay their rent, he continued. This notion that people work for minimum pay or that they aren’t compensated when they don’t travel is absurd.
He downplays the possible disruption, saying it will only impact “less than one percent” of the company’s activities in Europe.
In a dispute over wages, more than 700 Heathrow check-in and ground-handling employees voted in favor of strike action. Around July 22, when the summer break starts, the GMB and Unite unions are anticipated to announce strike dates.
Nearly 1.8 million BA passengers are scheduled to depart from Heathrow in July, according to aviation data company Cirium.
The pig-headedness of British Airways is causing severe disruption for vacationers, according to Nadine Houghton, national officer for the GMB.
Despite their best efforts, BA was only able to offer our members crumbs from the table in the shape of a 10% one-time incentive payment.
“The 10% that was wrongfully taken from our members last year must be restored, along with their full back pay and the 10% bonus that other coworkers have received.”
“GMB members at Heathrow have endured unspeakable abuse as they attempt to control the travel mayhem brought on by staff shortages and IT issues.”
Additionally, Unite is attempting to include 16,000 more BA employees in the strike, ranging from engineers to cabin crew.
The BA dispute concerns a 10% wage cut that check-in and ground-handling personnel accepted under Covid as airlines struggled to remain in business. Unions want full pay reintroduced in the face of rising costs of living and an increase in passenger traffic.
The management of British Airways, according to a representative for Unite, “can no longer ignore the general discontent across their own employees, in the same way they have ignored the requirements of their own consumers.”
As a direct result of its own previous disastrous “fire and rehire” tactics, “BA consumers know first-hand that the airline is in chaos and that service levels are suffering.”
Staff simply aren’t willing to put up with bad management choices any longer, or to pay the price.
Thousands of additional BA employees, including engineers and call center agents, have begun participating in a consultative ballot, according to the GMB.
If enough support is gathered, a formal ballot for strike action will start in a few weeks.
“I don’t think this is going to stop with customer check-in staff,” GMB general secretary Gary Smith told BBC Breakfast. Many of our members across the BA business are utterly exhausted by the layoffs at the organization.
Individuals want to see the salary and conditions restored because “they’ve witnessed the company being pushed into the dirt over a long period of time” and “they’re very unhappy about the cynical exploitation of the pandemic by the people at the top of BA.”
Given that it includes employees of both Heathrow and Gatwick airports, it increases the possibility of summertime disruption on a far larger scale.
GMB and Unite promised to end the strike only if BA complied with their requests within a week or so. Families might be forced to postpone or cancel vacations if the BA walkouts proceed, and they risk getting detained abroad if flights home are cancelled.
Only two weeks’ notice is required from unions before a strike. Customers with grounded flights are eligible for a refund or to be rebooked on another flight on the day of departure, even if it is operated by a different airline.
However, it is uncertain whether there would be enough seats given that airlines are reducing their schedules as a result of employee shortages and airport flight limits. It will cause BA, which suffered enormous financial losses due to the epidemic, to suffer greatly.
At Heathrow, approximately 550 BA flights depart and land each day, but this number is anticipated to increase in the summer. As a result, the airline is now developing emergency preparations to maintain as many flights as possible on strike days.
The action threatens to cancel hundreds of flights in total, with about half of them being short haul and the other half longer distance.
Downing Street urged BA to implement backup plans, claiming that a strike would only increase travelers’ “misery” at airports.
Spokesman for No. 10: “We would strongly encourage both to come together to find a settlement. This is obviously a matter for British Airways and the unions.
“We don’t want to see any more passenger inconvenience, and a strike would only make things worse for travelers at airports.”
The “Department for Transport will obviously work closely to look at what contingency measures BA could put in place and we expect BA to put in place contingency measures to ensure that there is as little disruption as possible and that where there is disruption, that passengers can be refunded,” according to the statement.
We are very dissatisfied with the outcome and the unions’ decision to pursue this line of action, according to a statement from BA.
We presented a 10% payment offer, which was accepted by the majority of our coworkers in spite of the incredibly difficult circumstances and losses of more than £4 billion.
“We are absolutely dedicated to working together to find a solution, because we need to work as a team to deliver for our customers and restore our business.”
As the situation develops, “We will of course keep our consumers updated about what this entails for them.”
Next month, a nine-day strike is also scheduled for EasyJet’s operations in Spain.
As unions representing other professions flex their muscles in search of inflation-busting wage increases, Britain may experience a summer of strikes.
The National Education Union has warned that unless ministers provide “inflation-plus wage rises for all teachers,” schools could be the next target of strike action.
A strike over salary is also being threatened by the unions that represent doctors, nurses, government employees, and postal workers.
Some people have even requested settlements that are 5% higher than inflation, which this week reached 9.1%.
According to a government aide, the formal independent pay review bodies should ‘in at least some circumstances’ suggest pay increases of up to 5% for public sector employees. These wage raises will have to come from already allocated funds.
It happened at the same time that Manuel Cortes, the head of the TSSA rail union, suggested that his organization might work with the militant RMT to prevent “any trains from running at all” during the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham next month.
A walkout over the Commonwealth Games, which start on July 28, could be planned by Mr. Cortes’ union, which is balloting employees at Network Rail and nine rail companies.
He responded, “That’s obviously a possibility, I rule absolutely nothing out,” when asked if the 10-day tournament, which England previously held in 2002, will be targeted.
‘It’s not impossible that we’ll leave together. And I’m positive there won’t be any trains running at all if our people strike alongside the RMT.
“We’re definitely on the verge of the biggest rail strike wave since 1926.”
The union, like the RMT, is in a salary and job security dispute with Network Rail and railway companies.
After going on strike twice already—on Tuesday and yesterday—RMT employees will strike again for 24 hours on Wednesday.
There are worries that the union may announce further strikes as early as July 9.
According to an Edinburgh Pride organizer, it is “actually quite terrible” that thousands of people would miss the yearly celebration owing to tomorrow’s anticipated rail strikes.
This weekend, passengers in the UK will experience more disruption as ongoing train strikes threaten to cancel thousands of services for a third day.
5,000 locals from Edinburgh and the surrounding areas are anticipated to attend, according to Jamie Love, marketing director for Edinburgh Pride, down from more than 12,000 attendees in 2019.