Last week we elected to return via Manchester to Malaga on bmi baby. What a shambles. The airport screens say we should go to desks 32-36. We arrive to find total mayhem as only two of the desks are manned and the line is not moving. I go over to customer services where there are three people doing nothing. I ask if they can get more agents onto the desks. Answer? “We only man two of the desks because we have online check-in. They’ll call you forward if the flight is closing.” Sure enough the flight starts to close and a rush of people stampede towards desk 36. Desk 32 in the meantime starts taking the final passengers. By the time we got to the check in desk we’d been waiting in line for an hour. Next stop the boarding gate.
Except the signs say ‘Go To Departure Lounge.’ Ask the customer service rep which gate they have for our flight. “141″ comes back the reply – except there is no-one there. Back to customer services: “Are you sure?” “That’s what’s showing on my screen.” Return to the gate only to find the world and his dog is squashed into the area allocated as Gate 141.
And if you think that was bad, then the poor folk trying to get on a bmi New York flight were in no better shape in the adjacent lines. It was pandemonium.
Why on earth an airline can’t see what’s happening and switch people into desk handling when it is clear the existing agents are struggling is beyond me. How airline operators can be so single minded astonishes me. Why for example can’t they work out from the ticket information they must have that ‘x’ number of people are likely to be checking in and then staff accordingly?
Judith told me that the outbound flight was just as bad because at Malaga there are no clear lines for each flight. It’s all something of a scrum which is a nightmare when two or three flights are scheduled to leave at around the same time. The same goes for EasyJet except they have people patrolling the lines calling last check in times. More waste when these people could be processing boarding passes. All of which makes air travel even more of a misery than it already is.
Rant over.
In other news, I just received my Iberia Silver card. At least I can now check in at Business Class desks, regardless of my class of ticket. That’s a blessing in itself.
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