Aussie airports brace for record crowds over Easter
Aussie travellers are facing ongoing mayhem across the country as airports feel the pressure of the Easter long weekend.
Sydney Airport is at the epicentre of the chaos, with travellers in the airport’s domestic terminals experiencing lengthy queues and hours of waiting to check-in and get through security.
With an already stretched staffing system and 82,000 people expected to go through the domestic terminal gates on Thursday - the busiest the airport’s been since 80,000 people filed through on March 6, 2020 - it’s unlikely that the pressure will ease anytime soon.
An additional 79,000 people are predicted to travel through the terminals on Good Friday, with numbers dropping to around 60,000 on Saturday and Sunday before picking up again.
Melbourne airport 5:45am.. big queues for bag drops but flights being called out to make sure people aren’t missing them. With traffic into airport too the advice is definitely still to get here early though! @10NewsFirstMelb #melbourneairport pic.twitter.com/R0M8HcdoO2
— Caty Price (@caty_price) April 12, 2022
But the chaos hasn’t been limited to Sydney, after Melbourne and Adelaide airports saw similar situations unfolding on Thursday morning.
Melbourne is also expecting crowds over the Easter break, with 380,000 people set to walk through the airport over the entire long weekend.
Brisbane hasn’t been spared either, with foot traffic of 56,000 predicted for Thursday.
In response, Australians have been advised to arrive at least two hours before their domestic flight - or three hours for international flights - and expect delays.
Lyall Stranby, the chief executive of Melbourne Airport, told news.com.au impacts of the widespread redundancies among airline and airport staff during the pandemic are still being felt despite efforts to rapidly expand the workforce.
“COVID-19 decimated airlines and airports and resulted in thousands of highly-skilled workers being stood down or made redundant,” she said.
“The airlines and their suppliers are now scaling up their workforce but given the safety-critical nature of the jobs they do; recruitment and retraining can take time.”
Travellers in Melbourne have also faced lengthy wait times for their luggage, with some waiting up to an hour to pick up their bags.
Sydney Airport chief executive Geoff Culbert said this period has been challenging for everyone, including passengers.
“We’ve got staff shortages, we’ve been rebuilding the business from the ground up,” Mr Culbert told 2GB’s Chris Smith on Wednesday.
“You go back to November last year, and we were all in lockdown, we were operating at one percent of normal capacity and we all started recruiting for Easter back in December last year, right when we got a sense of the borders were going to open but we just haven’t been able to get enough staff.
“Then you add on top of that the Covid issues, on any given day up to 20 percent of staff can’t come to work due to Covid. So we’re running at 60 percent of ordinary staff capacity.”
As staff face the crowds, senior staff at Sydney Airport have been told to leave their offices to help manage queues, while retail and IT staff have been redeployed onto the security floor, as reported by news.com.au.
With airport service staff, including security workers, now recognised as critical workers in NSW and Victoria, they are exempt from isolating for seven days if they are close contacts and have no COVID-19 symptoms.
Image: @cajlamb (Twitter)