The start of the 2022 summer season has come packed with crowds at major European airports. Among the most affected is Amsterdam Schiphol International Airport, one of the largest and busiest airports in Europe.
In the weekend that has just ended, Schiphol Amsterdam Airport faced a crowd like never seen in recent years! Tens of thousands of passengers passed through the airport on Saturday and Sunday. No fewer than 70 passengers passed through the airport between 000 a.m. and 10 p.m., Sunday, May 00. As a result, the airport was extremely crowded and endless queues formed at checkpoints and check-in desks.
Airports are asking airlines to cancel flights
In desperation, the authorities asked the airlines to cancel the flights. KLM announced that it had canceled about 50 flights on Saturday and Sunday, plus another 28 flights were canceled on Friday. TUI and Coreandon tried to move some flights to other airports in the Netherlands, while easyJet did not respond to the call from the airport. According to the Amsterdam airport management, the cancellation of the flights was intended to reduce the number of passengers in order to reduce the pressure on the ground staff, but unfortunately the target was not reached.
You may be wondering how this came about when one of the largest airports in Europe could not handle the high flow of passengers. Prior to the pandemic, the airport was carrying more than 70 million passengers a year.
Lack of ground staff generates congestion at airports
However, during the COVID-19 pandemic - 2020 and 2021 - the number of passengers has dropped to 20-25 million. During the pandemic, thousands of employees lost their jobs due to lack of flights and passengers, but also due to financial problems that threatened the stability of the airport.
The problem is that with the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions in the spring of 2022, the number of flights has risen sharply and the number of passengers has reached almost the same level as the pre-pandemic period.
In this context, the airport is facing a major staffing crisis and everything is translated into congestion at check-in and check-in points, delayed or canceled flights because there is no one to handle the planes. Some flights left without the passengers' luggage because there was no one to load them into the planes. Instead, some passengers waited for three hours waiting for their luggage after landing at Schiphol.
If you have flights to / from Amsterdam, check their condition. Passengers flying from Amsterdam are asked to show up at least three hours before the flight.