Frankfurt deletes connections
Staff shortage burdens airports before Easter wave
04/06/2022, 21:19
As a result of the corona pandemic, German airports are short of employees. But the number of passengers is now high again. Flights in Frankfurt have to be canceled as a result. The wave of travel at Easter could exacerbate the situation.
The start of the Easter holiday by plane will be a test of patience for passengers in the coming days. After two years of the Corona crisis, the processes at German airports are not yet working smoothly due to the high expected traffic figures due to a lack of staff. The Frankfurt airport operator Fraport announced that there would have to be flight cancellations in order to stabilize operations.
A Lufthansa spokeswoman said that a single-digit number of domestic German feeder flights to Frankfurt would be canceled on Thursday. The passengers could switch to the train. “This is how we ensure that people come on vacation,” she said. The flight plan for the following days is still being worked out. Basically, the human resources at all German airports are still tight, according to the largest German tour operator TUI. According to estimates by the airport association ADV, ground handling services and security checks currently have around 20 percent too few heads on board after the slump in employment during the pandemic.
Like Berlin-Brandenburg Airport, Frankfurt Airport had already warned last week about longer waiting times and advised to arrive early, as up to 170,000 people want to board planes a day. “Despite extensive recruiting measures and other optimization steps, Frankfurt Airport still does not have sufficient staff at many crucial points within the travel process,” explained Fraport.
Interplay between rush and calm
Especially at peak times in the late morning or early afternoon, there could be a problem. Then the business will be as strong as before Corona, in the hours in between there will be a lull again. This makes personnel planning more difficult, Fraport boss Stefan Schulte recently explained.
The operator wants to hire 1,000 new employees at Germany’s largest airport this year, but has only found around 300 of them. Many private service providers also carry out tasks such as baggage handling or check-in at the airports. The industry heavyweight Swissport is looking for 30,000 new people worldwide this year.
In Italy, on the other hand, companies rely more on short-time work to keep their employees. The airports of Milan and Rome therefore have enough employees to cope with the still low volume of traffic. TUI’s own airline TUIfly does not have to cancel any departures from Frankfurt, said a company spokesman. However, delays cannot be ruled out. “The bottleneck is mainly the security checks,” he explained. If there are delays here, it will lead to a chain reaction in the upstream and downstream steps, i.e. check-in and boarding.
TUI recommends being at the airport two or two and a half hours before departure. Arriving too early and queuing is also not advisable. “Then queues form even more because too many passengers from different flights gather in front of the counters.”
Condor is “cautiously optimistic”
The holiday airline Condor will also take off as planned, said a spokeswoman. In March, German air traffic control warned of delays from April. Recently, however, the tense situation caused by flight diversions due to the Ukraine war and a shift of controls from France to Germany has been mastered well, said a spokeswoman. “We are cautiously optimistic about the coming weeks.” The controllers want to guide the growing number of planes as punctually as possible.
There have been extensive flight cancellations in Great Britain in the past few days with the low-cost airline Easyjet, where around 60 connections a day were canceled, or with British Airways. In the British, the personnel situation worsened due to the high number of illnesses, after the country had relaxed corona precautions some time ago. After the job cuts in the Corona crisis, employees also looked for jobs in other sectors here and will not come back. It could be two or three months before this nasty cocktail was drunk, said Paul Charles, head of travel consultancy PC Agency.