KLM is stopping the sale of tickets for flights that will depart from Schiphol in the coming days. The airline is doing this because the airport is not succeeding in solving the problems that have arisen in recent months. It concerns tickets for KLM flights until next Sunday.
“We receive a lot of questions from customers who have seen the queues because of security and do not dare to leave from Schiphol,” said a spokeswoman. KLM offers a rebooking arrangement. In an explanation to travelers, the aviation organization states that the lines are ‘much longer’ than normal. “That has a big impact on the waiting time.”
The move by KLM, the main user of Schiphol, is a new dent in the image of the national airport. Today, an inventory of this site already showed that travelers are looking en masse for flights from other regional airports. Air travel from Rotterdam and Eindhoven are very popular on booking sites.
It is also busy at Schiphol today, on Ascension Day. Travelers with a European destination estimate their waiting time to reach security at about 45 minutes. For intercontinental flights, this is somewhat shorter. They find the lines of many hundreds of meters long that travelers have to pass through to reach security.
KLM employees do not call the situation at the airport much different from other days, although according to one of them, the busiest moment of Thursday morning was already around 5 a.m. “Then the line was all the way to the highway,” says one of them. She also says that she has been verbally abused a few times.
Action plan
Schiphol today presented an action plan to counteract large crowds at the airport during the summer period. The plan consists of four points: 1) recruiting more employees, such as security guards, 2) making working at Schiphol attractive, 3) optimizing the flow of passengers and 4) making agreements with airlines about flight planning. .
According to Schiphol, these measures should be used to manage the expected summer crowds in the right direction. “It is not the case that travelers will no longer stand in line, but we do promise that we will do everything we can to provide travelers with a predictable and pleasant Schiphol experience,” CEO Dick Benschop said in a statement.
The problems at the airport came to light around the May holiday. During the first weekend of that holiday, Schiphol turned out to be totally unable to cope with the passenger flows, and a large number of passengers missed their flights. Thanks to emergency measures, the airport got through the rest of the holiday in fits and starts.
For next summer it will have to crack hard nuts with the users of the airport, the airlines and tour operators. Schiphol has already hinted several times that flights should be canceled, but the airlines do not want to hear about it. They believe that director Benschop should ensure that the problems are solved in a different way.
Scatter
For example, KLM wants to work first on ‘other, more effective options than cancelling’, with the spreading of flights and the use of other airports being the most important. A spokesperson pointed out that Schiphol is not yet at the pre-corona level of 2019. “It is worrying that this is already causing such problems due to security shortages.”
Schiphol director Benschop also has to deal with the trade unions. The FNV union wants the number of flights to be reduced. People are already literally falling over due to the high work pressure, the union stated this week.
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