Easter holidays travel delays: Why there's airport chaos around the world, not just in Australia

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Easter holidays travel delays: Why there's airport chaos around the world, not just in Australia

By Michael Gebicki
A staff member directs passengers at Sydney Airport ahead of the Easter holidays.

A staff member directs passengers at Sydney Airport ahead of the Easter holidays.Credit: Getty Images

A stuff-up, a snafu, a schmozzle – and those are just some of the more polite words beginning with "S" that travellers were using to describe the airport chaos over the Easter break.

A surge in passenger numbers at the beginning of the Easter school holidays combined with staffing shortages caused long queues at check-in and security clearance. Seemingly anticipating problems, passengers were advised to arrive at least two hours before domestic flights ahead of the start of school holidays.

Queues started forming at 4am at Sydney Airport's domestic terminals on Easter Thursday, a day when 82,000 travellers were expected. By 7am those queues stretched out the door. Similar scenes were reported at Brisbane, Adelaide and Melbourne airports.

Passengers queue for check-in at Manchester Airport, which was also badly hit by staff shortages this month.

Passengers queue for check-in at Manchester Airport, which was also badly hit by staff shortages this month.Credit: Getty Images

Panic set in as airport management wrestled to find a solution. Sydney Airport security staff were offered $50 gift cards to work over the two-week school holiday period. When that was met with derision, the offer was boosted to a $1000 bonus to work every rostered shift over the holiday period.

As the Easter school holidays fired up family travel, Qantas managers were rostered to load aircraft at Sydney Airport. After flaring tempers and media frenzy, on the third day of airport queues the NSW state government exempted critical air transport workers from close-contact isolation rules, allowing them to return to work over the crucial Easter period.

Some aircraft took off packed with passengers and not a single piece of checked luggage. By contract Qantas flew a 787 Dreamliner from Melbourne to Sydney loaded with baggage and not a single passenger, one very expensive baggage cart.

It wasn't just us

In the UK, around 10,000 flights were expected to depart the country's airports over the four-day Easter weekend, five times the volume of the same period in 2021, and the strain showed.

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The Easter holiday saw long queues at Manchester, Heathrow and Gatwick airports in particular. UK airports had more than 1200 flights cancelled between March 28 and April 12 according to aviation analytics firm Cirium. Arriving passengers were reporting 90-minute waits for their checked baggage.

A traveller at Manchester Airport complained that British charter airline TUI had no check-in desks open, only self-check-in, and only three security lanes out of eight open.

Because the air travel system is linked across the globe, a stuff-up at Heathrow translated to une tempete de merde (France) and a God-awful mess (USA). Not that they faulted the Brits because each of these countries made their own contribution to the chaos for exactly the same reasons, namely understaffing.

Why it happened

Ask why it happened and the answer depends on who you're asking. According to a Qantas spokesperson, COVID-related staff shortages accounted for anything from 20 to 50 per cent of employees. Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce pointed the finger at passengers, claiming they were not "match fit" and causing delays after being on the bench for two years or more. Joyce subsequently beat a retreat, saying "I'm not 'blaming' passengers. Of course it's not their fault."

He wasn't alone however. Security staff also blamed passengers, accusing them of forgetting that laptops, liquids, aerosols and lithium batteries must be removed from carry-on bags before passing through the scanners, leading to increased frequency of bag inspections.

During the pandemic, baggage handlers, security and check-in staff and other airport employees were stood down or laid off. In Australia, many baggage handler jobs had been outsourced to overseas companies, and as such were ineligible for Jobkeeper payments.

According to Michael Kaine, national secretary of the Transport Workers' Union, Qantas' decision to outsource 2000 baggage handling roles was the reason for the "catastrophic scenes" at airports. "Those 2000 workers are ready, willing and able to come back to work but Qantas is not putting them back on, and now we're seeing this panicked response." Kaine said. "It's basically an excuse to fragment, casualize and impoverish their workforce freely."

To be fair, for the first time in two years Australians were able to travel freely to every part of the country, contributing to a spike in bookings. That could have been foreseen. Airlines had an accurate measure of the number of passengers booked to fly but the rapid spread of COVID-19 in early April - 76,000 new cases across the nation on April 5 – created unexpected staff shortages. Even so, when it was put under stress, it was the aviation industry that was lacking match fitness.

How long before it's fixed?

The commercial aviation industry put itself on a starvation diet during the pandemic. Pilots, cabin crew, call centre staff and airport workers were stood down or terminated. Some took redundancy packages, many looked for jobs outside the industry but now that the industry is showing green shoots, they're not coming back in the numbers required. Under normal traffic loads, airlines will cope but come surge periods and the strains will probably continue to show.

See also: New airport scanners speed up the queues, so where are they?

See also: Airlines, airports need to get 'match fit': Virgin CEO

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