Edinburgh Airport vows no repeat of baggage mountains this summer

Edinburgh Airport bosses have vowed there will be no repeat of last summer’s mountains of unclaimed luggage and long delays in reuniting passengers with their bags.

Thousands of travellers flying into Edinburgh arrived without their luggage last year and it was sometimes days before they received it. The problem was blamed on staff shortages among baggage handlers and the issue seemed mainly to involve bags not being transferred to connecting flights.

Edinburgh Airport has been 'flooded' with left luggage

But Edinburgh Airport chief executive Gordon Dewar said investment in extra handling staff, new storage space and a new tracker system should minimise luggage delays this year.

He said the scale of the missing luggage problem was new in the past few years and had become the “new norm” but the recent investment would combat its effects.

Mr Dewar said: “We've had in recent years this really big new challenge of short-shipped bags - that's when the bags don’t come on the same aircraft as the passenger and we end up with this challenge of reuniting them.

“We have put a huge amount of effort into that. Swissport, for example - and all the handlers are doing similar - have now got a team of 10 dedicated people to manage this. For some reason since Covid we’ve seen this massive uplift in short-shipped bags coming from a lot of airports, but the big European hubs being particularly problematic.

“And that's a new area of work for people, so we need to be resourced for it - so staffing levels on the handling, but we've also invested in the facilities to make sure we've got the storage for hopefully a short number of hours while we process them, and the tech to help them get off to their final destination and reunited with the passengers.

“I'd rather not have this problem. Clearly if you arrive without your bag it's frustrating, but what we can say is we're very confident you'll get that very quickly and we won't see anything like the big piles of bags we've had in previous years.”

Mr Dewar said the post-Covid increase in missing luggage had come as “a complete surprise to just about everyone in the industry”.  Previously, the airport might have seen about 10-12 bags a day miss a connection. “A bad day would be 50,” he said. And they would be spread out across a number of different destinations, usually through connecting hubs.

“Post Covid, we were seeing hundreds a day and nobody was equipped for it because we hadn't expected it and the handling staff, already struggling to do their core business, just didn't have any resource to deal with this completely unexpected problem.

“What's different this time round is we've accepted this is a new norm - we don't really understand why, or why airlines put up with that - but we're invested in ensuring, first, that our handlers have the resource to do it and I'm confident they have; we've invested in the facilities to store it, so it's not the mess that it was - baggage heaps and getting in people's way: and we've invested in the tech, the way people report a missing bag, making sure we've got the information we need so we can send it on really quickly and efficiently.

“You're still really annoyed, even if you get the bag 12 hours late rather than having it with you, but we're confident it won’t be two or three days and we'll get these things sorted on a daily basis.”