Kenya Airways (KQ) passengers have continued to face challenges transiting through European airports due to slow baggage processing with the carrier blaming shortage of staff for the delays.
The airline yesterday said it was experiencing “significant delays in processing bags from our European stations” causing passengers to arrive at their destinations ahead of their luggage.
“The delays are occasioned by a shortage of manpower and/or strikes. As a result, bags are not being processed in time to reach flights before they depart, leading to an unfortunate situation. This has affected most airlines, including the transfer of bags from other airlines to KQ,” said KQ in a statement.
The airline said it was working with affected airports to ensure customers’ bags were either being loaded onto next available flights or being sent to them through courier services.
“Once the bags arrive at the destination airport, our team will arrange delivery with a courier service to the addresses provided,” the carrier stated. The problem has now been experienced since last week with hundreds of KQ passengers being inconvenienced, with biggest baggage system failures reported Heathrow airport. The hitch was blamed for a huge pile-up of luggage at the airport’s Terminal 2 since last Friday.
Some passengers complained of two-hour waits at baggage reclaim their luggage London gateway facility, while others were left without luggage at all and had to fly without their bags.
This chaos has affected Kenya Airways and other airlines servicing key routes in Europe amid piling frustrations by thousands of travelers. UK airports have been hit by a series of travel disruptions since the onset of the peak summer travel season amid a heavy shortage of workers, leading to the cancellation of hundreds of flights. Critics said the UK travel industry failed to plan for the upsurge in passenger traffic after two years of disruption during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Some airlines in Britain such as TUI and EasyJet have even taken drastic steps and cancelled dozens of flights a week to improve customer service and reliability on remaining routes. EasyJet has even removed some aircraft seats to cut crew sizes.
But the airport chaos is not just in the UK alone. Scenes of chaos have been witnessed at some European airports such as Dublin, Ireland, and Schiphol, Amsterdam over the last week as people have started to venture abroad, sparked by a shortage of bag handlers, security, and airline staff that led to huge queues, missed flights and furious customers. BY DAILY NATION