Originally Posted by
SecondDog
No it wasn't. It is far to easy to make a blasé statement like that. That is half the problem. The airport had put additonal measures in place and were let down by a contractor. Of course there is no explaining that to the public, they just see an airport and can't understand why arriving at 0615 for a 0700 flight is madness (for example). Now I expect to see that from the gen pop. but I had expected you guys on here to understand the realistic picture a bit more.
I understand that things go wrong but it must have been planned on a shoestring if, as you say, a few people failed to turn up and it caused a mess.
There is also a bigger picture here. How much revenue did the airport lose as a result of people standing in security queues? eg. What if all those people were going to spend £5 each airside and didn’t get a chance because they were stuck in a queue? Its bad news.
You have to invest to make money and that, from a regular travellers perspective, just doesn’t appear to be happening.
Is anything being done to protect the priority security lines during these busy times? Or, are they also being swamped by people paying at the top of the stairs? I have an annual pass for fast track for a reason...that reason is so I can turn up with minimal time before my flight and reasonably expect to make it. If that reason goes away, I will re-assess whether or not to move my business to City where possible. That is also bad news if a percentage of the regulars who provide a constant revenue stream start to think the same way.
I have little sympathy for the managers whise job it is to organise this stuff. I work in an industry where systems redundancy is a key part of business strategy. There is no excuse for an airport making record profits to skrimp on a relative few quid to make sure this doesn’t happen.