Originally Posted by
hec7or
The cause of much of charter travel delay and disruption is the resort changeover day concept of the fixed 1 or 2 week break which requires a large number of flights to converge on the destination airport on the same day creating congestion both on the ramp and in the terminal as the flights are timed to arrive in order to deliver passengers to the buses which then head out to the resorts having just brought the inbound passengers from the resorts.
This puts pressure on the airports in terms of check in, baggage handling, security, ramp handling and also ATC both at the airport in terms of parking and runway slots and also en-route. Personally, I think the way ahead is to do away with changeover day altogether and sell more bespoke holidays using the scheduled airlines. (and get rid of the night flights)
A similar situation occurs with fly-cruises. We did one out of Malta during the first 2 weeks of April. The majority of the charters to get people to and from MLA from various points in the UK are operated for P&O Cruises by Tui (although they put us on Jet2 flights to and from BHX)
On 6am departure from BHX it seemed that the people on the Tui charter (which operated at the same time give or take 10 mins) faced a much longer queue for check-in than we did with Jet2. Our flight to MLA was full, with probably half of those onboard going to the ship. On arrival in MLA, several other flights arrived at the same time with pax all going to the ship (I estimate around 2000 people) but the operation was pretty good (with lots of Jet2 and P&O Cruises ground staff at the airport to smooth things along).
The real pinch-point was on return to the UK 2 weeks later. Around a dozen flights (mostly Tui and a few Jet2, Easyjet) all departing back to the UK within a few hours window, and the scene at the departure gates in MLA was chaotic, with people standing, sitting (if they were lucky) and lying around wherever they could. It seemed we were sent to the gate area (which is quite small and could not cope) way too early (well before the i/b aircraft had landed) with the resulting scene bordering on a health and safety concern for an hour or so.
Not sure how to solve this one, the flights have to be timed to get people to and from the ship at the right time (its on a 1 day turnaround in port), but the experience (at the end of a good 2 week holiday) was not good.