Terror crisis lead to confusion and points scoring

Comment by Jeremy Skidmore (www.jeremyskidmore.com)

The handling of the terror crisis has led to massive confusion for the travelling public and the opportunity for several companies to pursue their own agenda.

Nobody pretends it has been easy for the government or airports’ authority BAA, particularly at Heathrow, where 67 million passengers travel every year from a hub with a capacity of 58 million. It is congested when everything runs like clockwork.

But let’s hope we are better prepared when the next alert comes, as it surely will.

The initial reaction to the crisis was swift. The government informed the BAA at 2am on August 10^th that they would have to impose new limits on hand luggage within three hours and, in the circumstances, the authorities reacted smartly.

But when the rules were relaxed by the government within a few days, passengers turned up at airports expecting to take electrical equipment on to flights, only to be told that BAA would not be ready for the change for another 24 hours.

We also had literally thousands of flights cancelled and, consequently, tens of thousands of bags mislaid, if only for a short period.

For the first week of the crisis, it was not widely known that you could in fact take drinks, cosmetics and anything else you wanted on to flights, provided you were not travelling to the US and you bought the items in airside shops after passing through duty-free. People mistakenly thought they would have to travel to the Mediterranean or further without any water.

BAA’s website information on this was not particularly helpful; it stated the strict limits on cabin baggage and only mentioned much further down that the page that you could take shop purchases on board. BAA felt it was inappropriate in the circumstances to crow about the fact that you can buy everything in their shops. That was understandable but added to the confusion.

Meanwhile, airlines have been encouraging people to turn up at least three hours before their flights and be prepared for long queues as currently 50 per cent of people need to be body searched, compared with 25 per cent before the crisis. This has worried the public into thinking they need to get there many hours – sometimes four or five – before departure to ensure they make it on board.

But this morning, on the start of the bank holiday weekend, BAA chief executive Stephen Nelson appeared on television to tell people not to arrive too early because they would add to the congestion at the airports.

Meanwhile, BAA and the airlines have not missed an opportunity to score points off each other. There is much history there. British Airways and Ryanair are keen to see BAA’s monopoly at UK airports broken (BA has re-iterated it this week) and so, politically, it serves their cause to highlight any deficiencies in the authority’s systems.

BA and Ryanair have both very publicly claimed BAA does not have enough staff to cope and the latter is planning to sue for compensation. Ever the man to grab a PR opportunity, Ryanair’s boss Michael O’Leary used the spotlight to launch a promotional campaign.

There’s no such thing as bad publicity, within reason, and it’ll be interesting to see what happens to Ryanair’s sales during this period.

BAA has strongly defended its position and claimed it now has enough people to cope. In response to criticisms at the beginning of the crisis, a spokesman asked me: “Do you think we have hundreds of staff, just sitting around doing nothing, ready to man desks within three hours of being given an order at 2am?”

Sources at BAA have also suggested that, after the first few days of the terror alert, some airlines were cancelling flights for commercial reasons and blaming it on them. All the carriers I’ve spoken to say this is utter nonsense.

Meanwhile, easyJet has announced, on the back of the crisis, that it will start charging people for putting extra bags in the hold. This is either sensible thinking to encourage travellers to pack lightly, or blatant profiteering, depending on your point of view.

Whichever way you look at it, the handling of the crisis has been a mess and enough to put you flying for life.

I, though, am taking a flight from Gatwick this afternoon, on probably the busiest Friday of the year. I’m really looking forward to it!