Three hours from arrival at Barcelona airport on Monday morning until pass passport control for travel to the United States. It’s time for a passenger whose testimony has been collected by this newspaper in El Prat wait to board his plane because passengers are crammed into the police refinery.
Friday May 13th at
10 a.m.: 12 transcontinental flights landing within two hours in Barcelona. The queue at check-in for non-EU passengers extends a few dozen metres. “We’re not going to be out of here in at least an hour,” one American couple lamented. “It happens more and more because of the lack of police officers, and the passengers get nervous; I was scolded one day by a Dutchman who lost a connecting flight because of the waiting list,” an airport worker commented on vanguard .
Airlines favorably appreciate the increase in the number of customers announced by the internal
The situation has been intensively repeated at other Spanish airports in recent weeks due to the sharp increase in the number of passengers and the shortage, according to airlines, of police officers at passport control – and not at the airport itself. Long queues, congestion, waiting and missing flights. And the effects of Brexit: The United Kingdom, one of the largest source countries of tourists, is no longer a member of society and now has stricter border controls.
Barcelona, however, is not the worst airport. The companies consulted insist that “accidents in El Prat are accurate, and the most serious problems occur in Barajas, Palma de Mallorca, Alicante or Tenerife Sur”. On Monday this week, sources from the aviation sector explained that when Iberia sounded the alarm about chaos in queues, there was also a malfunction in the digital passport system that exacerbated the flow of travelers.
Thus, congestion in this filter has been installed in Spanish tourist airports at the summer gates, something that companies have been warning about for months, and the government has arranged to solve it at the end of this month by reinforcing 500 items at the checkpoints. . Companies welcomed the move by the Interior. They pointed out from Iberia that “this is the right direction for the summer to be positive”, pending the implementation of the increase in troops and seeing how it works in the summer season which is expected to be the same as before. After the pressure from the airlines in recent days, which upset the interior, the companies chose to keep the hatchet. “We know that Aena has sufficient resources, Enaire has increased the ATC workforce and hopefully through these internal actions we can resolve the last remaining cloud,” which was a document candidate, said yesterday, in a conciliatory tone, Javier Gándara, President ALA Airlines Association.
But the recovery of passengers and the correct arrival of tourists by plane to Spain depends not only on the country’s airports and the control of internal borders. Strikes, delays and flight cancellations have occurred at major airports in Europe since Easter. There was a black day in Italy yesterday due to a strike by Ryanair, easyJet and Volotea workers that forced the cancellation of 360 flights and affected 4,000 passengers, Reuters reported. Today, Charles de Gaulle Airport is facing a day of protests by its workers, with airlines forced to cancel 25% of flights scheduled for the morning. At least two years later, the airline sector is struggling to modernize its operations.
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