Lost baggage: the post-Covid travel chaos snarling up Europe’s airports

Newlyweds Lisa Young and Kieran Connole have no clue where their luggage is.

The Galway-based couple flew out of Dublin Airport at the start of this month for their honeymoon on a Mediterranean cruise but their luggage didn’t go with them.

The bags have been lost amid the chaos caused by delayed and cancelled flights, baggage handler shortages and general airport screw-ups that have plagued the aviation industry across Europe since travel rapidly rebounded since the lifting of Covid-19 restrictions.

The couple were originally booked on a morning flight to Amsterdam on Monday, July 4th, but a lengthy delay and concerns that they would miss their cruise ship led them to book onto another flight to Zurich. A double booking got them bumped from that flight, but not their luggage.

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“After four hours in baggage claim, we cut our losses and went to Swords in Dublin to buy a few bits. We eventually got on a flight to Munich and caught our cruise ship in Sicily on the Tuesday. We were supposed to sail from Rome on the Monday,” said Young.

Last time they checked, Kieran’s luggage made it to Rome and Lisa’s had ended up in Athens. The bags were meant to be flown on to the Greek island of Santorini but have not arrived there.

“We have no idea where they are now. At the end of the day, they are only things and there are bigger issues in the world but it’s so annoying, especially when it could have been avoided,” she said.

While Dublin Airport has resolved the security-staff shortages that led to chaotic queues and missed flights for hundreds of passengers at the airport several weeks ago, severe problems remain with baggage handling, caused by a shortage of baggage handlers primarily in other European airports that has had a knock-on effect on the luggage situation in Dublin.

‘Dump chutes’

Airport operator DAA has no role in handling baggage. It manages the infrastructure – the conveyor belts and baggage “dump chutes”, as handlers call them – but the handling of the baggage itself is managed by Ryanair and Aer Lingus, which operate their own baggage handling, and the two main baggage handling companies, Swissport and Sky Handling Partner, that handle baggage for the other airlines using the airport. Aer Lingus uses Sky Handling Partner for some of its baggage handling. Ryanair seems to be the least affected airline.

The baggage problems stem from the fact that the aviation industry has struggled to cope with the return to pre-pandemic travel levels when so many staff left the industry during the pandemic with the collapse in international travel. The quick return of pre-Covid travel levels left the sector flat-footed. Shortages of baggage handlers in big European airports, including Schiphol in Amsterdam and London Heathrow and Gatwick, through which many Irish travellers fly, have caused problems in Dublin, reflecting the interconnectedness of international travel.

Bags are not being loaded onto connecting flights into Dublin and so handlers receive batches of off-schedule luggage that must be sorted through, and this has a knock-on effect at busy times.

“All of these delays – baggage being left behind, baggage going missing – is really down to staff shortages. That is the problem. Once that starts to happen, you have this domino effect,” said Jerry Brennan, an industrial organiser in the aviation sector for trade union Siptu.

He refers to a recent flight that left Dublin for Schiphol. When it arrived, there were no baggage handlers available to remove the bags, so the luggage came back to Dublin with the plane. Airlines do not want to lose key landing slots at busy airports, so baggage becomes collateral damage.

“The luggage is then removed and the new luggage is put on and we are hoping that the people at the other end are there to take it off or you have a repeat of the situation,” he said.

For some passengers, the problems have turned into personal nightmares. Andy Irvine, the acclaimed traditional Irish musician, lost two musical instruments valued at €16,000 while travelling out of Dublin to a folk festival in Denmark. He took three flights, flying via Frankfurt and Copenhagen, but his custom-built guitar-bouzouki and mandola did not arrive with him.

“The money is on Copenhagen,” Irvine told The Irish Times when asked where he thought the instruments, last seen 17 days ago, might be now.

He can claim for the lost baggage under travel insurance within 21 days but says the instruments are worth “an awful lot more than the convention allows the airline to pay”.

“If the airlines cannot operate efficiently, they shouldn’t be operating at all. It is nonsense, complete nonsense,” he said.

Chaotic scenes

There have been chaotic scenes at Dublin Airport in recent weeks as returned Irish passengers have gone in search of lost baggage, which, in some cases, have been missing for weeks.

One south Dublin man, who lost two bags from a US business trip to Seattle, returning via Schiphol, described the chaos of searching for bags during just a two-hour period set aside when a baggage handling agent was physically present to deal with passengers directly. The agent could only take six people into another holding area out of a group of about 30, resulting in “a scrum” among passengers because there was nobody organising a first-come, first-served queue.

Searching for bags lost in late June, he described seeing hundreds of bags lying around between baggage carousels and stacked against walls in the terminal. Some bags had been there since May, he said. Customers, who had Apple AirTags on their bags that allowed them to geolocate them to within a few feet, were able to find theirs quickly. Others weren’t so lucky.

“I was there for six hours,” said the man, who eventually found one of his missing bags. “I am lucky there is nothing sentimental in the bags but there were expensive work clothes.”

The situation has not just been stressful for passengers.

Jerry Brennan of Siptu said he knew of one employee at a baggage handling firm who was out on work-related stress due to the pressure of trying to manage difficult situations. In one incident in late May, the worker, while working on his own in the baggage hall, was confronted by angry passengers waiting several hours at the luggage carousels after disembarking flights.

“He was very frightened and felt extremely nervous in the situation, at how people were starting to manhandle him. People were grabbing at his arm and at his jacket,” said Brennan.

It is estimated there could be more than 2,000 waylaid cases lying in Dublin Airport. Outside facilities have been used for storage to prevent the already congested terminals becoming even busier with returning passengers searching for lost bags. One report recently suggested that about 300 bags a day are arriving into the airport on the wrong flights. Before the pandemic, the corresponding figure was closer to 30 bags a day. One source shared a photograph with The Irish Times of a dump chute at the airport last Tuesday with heaps of checked luggage backed up.

Missing since June

One businessman who didn’t want to be named is among the many passengers whose bags never accompanied him on an overseas flight and now appear to be lost somewhere in Dublin Airport. His bags have been missing since June 29th when he flew from Dublin to Copenhagen.

The bags did not make the flight and were routed through Oslo to Copenhagen two days later. He says the luggage appears to have been returned to Dublin Airport on July 1st.

He described the handling service provided by Sky Handling Partner for the airline as “incredibly bad” with “zero updates” on the status of his luggage and no response to more than 100 attempts to contact them by phone, email and via social media (Twitter and LinkedIn).

“The airline abdicated responsibility to Sky Handling, who are simply out of control. I am exasperated at the lack of respect for the passengers from the management. In my view, they are so short-staffed they can’t even keep up with new bags, so the problem propagates,” he said.

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Asked about the situation at Dublin Airport, a spokesman for Sky Handling Partner said that it was “mindful and conscious” of the impact the travel disruptions were having on passengers.

The operator has more than doubled staff numbers at Dublin Airport, rising from more than 200 to more than 500, to assist passengers with collecting their bags.

The company blamed external issues for the problems, saying that “resource and infrastructure issues at overseas hub airports” had primarily caused the current baggage delays. This had resulted in “a significant increase in passengers and their bags being separated on original flights into Dublin with bags arriving on later flights over the course of several days,” the company said.

“We are making every effort to reunite passengers with belongings that have arrived on later flights as quickly as possible,” said the spokesman.

‘Increasing pressure’

Swissport said the aviation sector was “under increasing pressure” at present and that it had increased its workforce in Dublin by more than 300 employees.

“Our team is working hard to minimise the disruption as much as we can. We understand this is a really frustrating situation and we’re working closely with airport and airline partners to find solutions for this industry-wide issue,” said the company.

Aer Lingus similarly blamed the “widespread disruption and resource challenges” across many airports, but most notably London Heathrow, Amsterdam and Paris. It said the problems were “outside of our control” resulting in delayed or misdirected baggage.

The airline apologised to customers whose bags have been delayed and said it had taken measures to speed up the delivery of bags to affected customers.

“Our team on the ground is continuing to work closely with all the relevant handling agents to retrieve delayed or misdirected baggage as quickly and as efficiently as possible,” said the airline.

The advice to future travellers from Jerry Brennan of Siptu is try to bring only carry-on or wheel-on luggage, thus avoiding the gamble of checking in bags.

“If you can put it in a 10kg bag, then do so, but I understand that there are people who won’t be able to do that,” he said.