Baggage delay warning at Scotland's busiest airport

Gordon Dewar, chief executive of Edinburgh Airport, which is expected to welcome 15 million passengers this year, said delayed baggage incidents have risen from around ten a day to hundreds.

He said it is hoped passengers who have been parted with their luggage will wait no longer than two days and “hopefully within a day” this summer. The airport has moved to mitigate the problem with site partners. 

Mr Dewar said: "Challenges, as always, this is really about working with our partners and making sure everyone understands what is coming at us. The handlers are key partners in all of this, we have on site Swissport, Menzies and WFS.

"We have had in recent years this really big new challenge with short ship bags, that’s where the bags don’t come on the same aircraft with the passenger and we have had this challenge of reuniting people."

He continued: "We have put a huge amount of effort into that. Swissport, and it’s just an example because all the handlers are doing similar, have now got a team of ten dedicated people to manage this.

"We’ve never seen anything like this before.

"For some reason since Covid we have seen this massive uplift in short ship bags coming from a lot of the airports but the big European hubs that have been particularly problematic.

"Of course that is a new area of work for people so we need to be resourced for it, so staffing levels in the handling but we have also invested in the facilities to make sure that we’ve got storage for hopefully a short number of hours while we process them, and the tech to get them away and off to their final destination and get them back reunited with their passengers as well.

"I would rather not have this problem. Clearly if you arrive without your bag it is frustrating but what we can say is we are very confident we will get that back very quickly and we won’t see anything like the big piles of bags we’ve had in previous years."

He added: "I can’t say there won’t be a repeat because the problems exist elsewhere, so it is the big hubs, the [European] airports missing people’s flights. We still expect and we are planning for larger than we would like levels of missed baggage.

"What we can promise is that the time between the bag arriving at Edinburgh Airport and getting it back to you will be much, much quicker than it was in the past, ideally no more than two days and hopefully within a day."

He also said recent ePassport issues which had been balmed for caused recent queues while not a "worry" should also be considered.

Mr Dewar also said there would be no change to security this summer, with "100ml rules remaining in place and large electricals to also be removed as usual".

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