In 2022, millions of passengers had to wait for their suitcases, sometimes for days. The rush is still pending at the Lufthansa hubs in Frankfurt and Munich – but the industry sees itself well prepared.
Air traffic continues to increase sharply – but according to the assessment of the Federal Association of the German Aviation Industry (BDL), a suitcase chaos like last summer is not to be feared. Airlines and airports have learned a lot from the past year and passed the first tests at Easter and just at the start of the holiday season in North Rhine-Westphalia, said BDL Managing Director Matthias von Randow on Wednesday in Munich.
Lufthansa flight operations are much more stable and punctual than last year, said airline boss Jens Ritter in Frankfurt. Lufthansa mastered the endurance test over Pentecost with adverse weather, a closed runway and more than 390,000 passengers at the Frankfurt and Munich hubs.
How did the chaos of 2022 come about?
Mainly because of Corona. At the beginning of 2022 there were still travel warnings because of the Omicron variant, but in March all restrictions were suddenly lifted. The skyrocketing demand for air travel caught the industry, which had just been at a standstill, unprepared. In the summer of 2022, there were sometimes chaotic conditions and extremely long waiting times at Frankfurt, Düsseldorf and other German airports because there were no staff to handle baggage. In July 2022, around 3,000 suitcases from Lufthansa passengers were to be forwarded in Munich – half of them from other airports that could no longer keep up with the processing. There were also very long queues at some airports for check-in and security checks.
According to an evaluation by the airline IT service provider Sita, in 2022 176 pieces of luggage for every 10,000 pieces of luggage were misdirected or delivered late in Europe, in the USA only 63 and in Asia only 30. Why the Europeans did so badly is still being investigated – he has none Answer, said von Randow. According to Sita, 25.4 million suitcases were misrouted worldwide – very annoying for the passengers, but very expensive for the industry: Each misdirected suitcase costs the airline up to 150 US dollars.
What’s going better now?
When it comes to baggage handling, there are no longer any major gaps in staff: “The staff are essentially standing,” said von Randow. “We have tens of thousands of semi-skilled workers,” said the BDL boss. The monthly salary is around 3000 euros. Additional staff can only be found outside the EU. Many long-term unemployed in Germany do not meet the requirements for reliability, qualifications, social skills, language and health. That is why he is happy about the new immigration law.
Last year, the industry tried to quickly hire 2,000 workers from Turkey. This failed due to the short deadlines, qualifications and German language skills of the applicants. Ultimately, only around 100 were used in Munich and Nuremberg.
Another big lever for improvement is technology. BDL economics expert Dirk Helf said that the proportion of online check-ins in Germany has now risen significantly to over 50 percent. In Munich, around 90 percent of Lufthansa passengers check in themselves.
More and more CT scanners are simplifying and accelerating the process at security checks because less hand luggage has to be unpacked to check laptops or drinks, for example. The Federal Procurement Office had a hard time, but “Munich was very much ahead. Bavaria simply said we would do a test operation,” said von Randow. In Munich, time slots to be booked by the passengers for the security checks were tested, but abandoned again. An airport spokesman said that it didn’t go any faster.
The Lufthansa airline hired more than 1,000 new people for its own operations and advanced automated processes, said Ritter. Great care is also taken to ensure that the first flight in the morning starts on time, so as not to start the daily circulation with delays. Lufthansa also canceled thousands of flights for this summer in order to enable stable operations together with airports, air traffic control and handlers. More replacement machines and reserve crews are available for this purpose.
Where else is there a problem?
One is not quite satisfied with the punctuality, said Ritter. At baggage claim, automation is not yet very advanced, said Helf.
How is the traffic volume developing?
Lufthansa is offering about 85 percent of the pre-crisis capacity in the summer. Randow said the utilization of the machines is also increasing. The volume of air traffic in Germany is likely to be a good 10 percent above the previous year’s level. The European traffic without the feeders to the hubs is significantly lower – but in long-distance traffic Frankfurt is already at 91 percent, Munich at 83 percent. North American traffic has been stronger in Munich for a year now than it was then, and Lufthansa uses the wide-bodied A380 here.
Source: Stern
