After a bad couple of months, with airports piling up passengers and baggage and taking the blame for not planning ahead and hiring enough staff, one of the busiest and most bogged down, London Heathrow, is pointing the finger at passengers instead.
According to the airport, everything, or nearly everything, would be just fine if passengers remembered to follow the rules for what can go in carry-ons and what has to be opened to be checked by security staff.
The airport says that “Heathrow data shows that at least 60% of bags rejected at security checkpoints are subjected to time-consuming hand searches because passengers haven’t removed all of their liquids from bags before screening, as set out by the Government’s rules.” With a sweep of magic math, the airport claims that passengers collectively wasted 2.1 million minutes in July, or about four years.
But, while it’s certainly true that things go smoother at screening when you’re prepared, blaming the passengers still comes nowhere near explaining the arriving checked luggage that didn’t make it to the carousel or the next plane, leaving the airport with embarrassing thousands of bags piled up, a matter that’s about to become a huge headache for travel insurance companies as well as the passengers.
