Passengers heading to Heathrow’s Terminal 5 were told to leave their bags behind or wait hours to collect their bags due to an apparent lack of staff at the British Airways home on Saturday and Sunday.
Baggage ‘chaos’ swept through the airport a day after Storm Eunice swept through Britain, leaving a trail of destruction and forcing the cancellation of hundreds of flights at the windswept airport from West London.
Baggage delays, however, do not appear to be directly linked to the stormy conditions, although passengers have complained that no one from British Airways or Heathrow was willing to explain what was going on behind the chaotic scenes.
Some passengers said they were forced to wait several hours for their bags to appear on the baggage carousel on Saturday, but by evening the system had apparently stopped completely and customers were told to go home and fill out a lost baggage form.
Adam on Twitter called British Airways a “shame” for its handling of the situation.
“Hiding your customer service staff when asked for updates and mountains of undelivered/unclaimed bags. Blaming the wind when the reality is you are understaffed. Embarrassing,” the tweet continued.
Adam was made to wait three hours for his luggage, but others said they had been waiting for at least four hours.
“The captain said a shortage of ground staff meant that baggage from the inbound flight was slow to unload and baggage from our flight even slower to load,” a user said on the FlyerTalk message board after the delay. of their flight to Geneva.
Another user said the situation was still bad on Sunday morning. After arriving on an overnight flight from Chicago, passengers had to wait 40 minutes just for buses to take them to the terminal.
It was only the beginning of the wait… Their luggage took several hours to appear on the baggage carousel.
With so many passengers forced to report their bag as missing, some have started complaining that BA’s online lost baggage report form has crashed.
In a statement, British Airways blamed the continued bad weather, saying: “We are currently facing continued disruption following storms in the UK and across Europe this week.”
“We are sorry for the inconvenience we know this may have caused. Rest assured that we will do all we can to help you and we have volunteers from across the airline arriving at Heathrow to offer their support.
Rather than waiting at the airport to collect their bags, BA suggests customers simply go home and wait for their bags to be couriered to them. “If you are still at the airport, we recommend that you return home or to your destination and we will send your luggage to you by courier as soon as possible,” the statement continued.
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