Dublin airport to review procedures after travel chaos

DUBLIN AIRPORT is to review its procedures for handling severe weather emergencies after the heavy snowfall before Christmas led to massive disruption to passengers’ travel plans.

Thousands of travellers failed to make it home for Christmas, while 10 passengers ended up sleeping in the airport on Christmas night after dozens of flights were cancelled on Christmas Eve.

Ryanair cancelled 91 flights across Europe on Christmas Eve, eight of them from Dublin, and Aer Lingus cancelled 18 departures from Dublin.

A Dublin Airport Authority spokeswoman admitted Christmas Eve was the “day from hell”. There were long queues at the Ryanair and Aer Lingus ticketing desks and both airlines were only able to accommodate passengers with bookings.

The 10 people who spent Christmas in the airport were provided with blankets and access to food retailers in the terminal.

She said the various agencies involved would meet early in the new year to review how the crisis was handled and see if things could be done better in future.

There were angry scenes on Christmas Eve as passengers whose flights had been cancelled queued for hours to rebook. A number of those caught up in the chaos have written to The Irish Timeswith graphic accounts of the delays they suffered.

US businessman Jeremy Josephson was with more than 300 other passengers on a US Airways flight from Dublin to Philadelphia which spent more than seven hours on the tarmac in Dublin before being cancelled.

Mr Josephson has written to the DAA seeking reimbursement of €900 spent on lost flights and other expenses because of what he claimed was the “gross mismanagement” of the airport.

As well as being stranded on the US Airways flight, his incoming flight to Dublin was kept waiting for 90 minutes before the gate was opened and two successive Ryanair flights from Dublin to Amsterdam were cancelled.

He waited almost two hours for a bus to Dublin and then took a ferry to get to Manchester for another flight to Amsterdam. However, he missed this flight and returned to Dublin and the nightmarish journey home on board the US Airways flight to Philadelphia.

Mr Josephson, who says he had never missed a flight in 30 years of business travel, says he will never visit Dublin again.

“Why do you have that stunning new terminal? Or is it that you do not want to dirty the floor?”

The DAA said it was not responsible for the problems, which it put down to the “unprecedented” weather conditions. A spokeswoman pointed out that more than eight inches of snow fell on Dublin airport and temperatures fell to -10 degrees in the 24 hours before Christmas Eve.

Staff worked around the clock to clear 120,000 tonnes of snow from the runways.

Eilin O’Dea arrived in the airport at 2pm on Christmas Eve to fly to Zurich at 5pm with Aer Lingus. The flight was cancelled and she was advised to leave the airport and rebook online.

Having been told the airline’s website was “clogged up”, she joined a queue to rebook but was told the waiting time was nine to 11 hours.

“The attitude of Aer Lingus staff was that there was nothing they could do, it was an act of God,” she said. She claimed people who spoke up were threatened with airport police and that people in the queue were told that the desk would close at 7pm “one way or the other”.

An Aer Lingus spokesman said flights had to be cancelled after aircraft were caught out of position because of the weather and because of restrictions on operations at the airport.

He said he understood people’s frustration but staff had been working “flat out” for weeks to deal with the weather and as a result, many thousands of passengers had got home for Christmas.

A reader said her son and his wife flew from Seoul to Amsterdam on Christmas Eve, intending to take a connecting flight to Dublin. However, this was cancelled and the pair did not arrive until St Stephen’s Day. She asked why the flight was cancelled without explanation when both Amsterdam and Dublin airports were operating.

Another reader complained about the actions of security guards in waking up stranded passengers who had fallen asleep in airport cafes and moving them on.

A DAA spokeswoman said this should not have happened and it would be looked at in the review.