"Luggage problems expected at Schipol Airport this summer"

Wednesday, May 16, 2001

Luggage problems expected at Schipol Airport this summer
By Tony Kennedy
The Minneapolis (MN) Star Tribune


Minnesotans who fly in and out of Amsterdam this summer will be crossing
their fingers for luck at the luggage carousels as Northwest Airlines and
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines wrestle with a bag system prone to mix-ups.

The equipment at Schipol International Airport can't adequately handle the
heavy flow of bags checked by summer vacationers, Northwest and KLM said.
Consequently, bag losses are expected to be higher than usual, as they were
last summer.

Bag losses are expected to be high even though Northwest and KLM have beefed
up staffing and added temporary carousels to sort some bags on the ramp.

"We hope this is the last summer we have to do this," KLM spokesman Bart
Koster said.

He said Dutch authorities are expected to phase in a new system at Schipol
this year.

Travel agent Pat Humble of Waters Travel of Wayzata said she had first-hand
experience of Schipol's under-powered bag-sorting machinery last summer when
Northwest lost her luggage in Amsterdam.

Client complaints

Since then, she said, it has become a familiar complaint of clients who book
summer travel through KLM's headquarters city. Not only is Schipol KLM's
principal hub, but it also is the transatlantic gateway for the
Northwest-KLM alliance. Of Northwest's $9.5 billion in total passenger
revenues last year, nearly $1 billion came from the Atlantic region.

"It's a major problem," Humble said. "And they don't find your bags in two
minutes, either."

Dirk McMahon, Northwest senior vice president-ground operations, said
Schipol's automated bag-sorting system will be overloaded by 1,500 bags an
hour during peak traffic times this summer. Last year, as KLM scrambled to
build an auxiliary system to handle the overload, about 80 of every 1,000
Northwest bags were getting lost, McMahon said. Normally, fewer than 5 per
1,000 bags are lost at Northwest.

This summer, with Northwest and KLM better prepared for Schipol's capacity
constraints, McMahon is hoping for a loss ratio closer to 20 lost bags per
1,000.

"I'm confident we'll be better," McMahon said.

NWA staff at Schipol

In an attempt to "get ahead of the power curve," Northwest last month
dispatched 30 baggage handlers to Schipol for 89-day assignments, McMahon
said. More Northwest crews could be added next month if KLM falls short of
its plan to hire 230 summer workers, he said. The Northwest workers are
lodged at company expense in Amsterdam hotels.

"It's costing a tremendous amount of money, but our biggest concern is that
we deliver what we promise," KLM's Koster said.

He said KLM will try to recover some of the money from authorities at
Schipol.

McMahon said KLM has built three luggage carousels for sorting bags on the
ramp. Each carousel is capable of processing 750 bags an hour. But the ramp
carousels can be used only for bags that don't have to be X-rayed on the
main system.

Any bags kept off the main luggage system improve the chances that it won't
be overloaded.

"It's a way to vent the system," McMahon said. "It's definitely a Band-Aid
to the main problem of just creating a system that can do everything you
want."

 Do you have an opinion about this story?
Share it with other readers in our CAA Discussion Forums

http://www.californiaaviation.org/cgi-bin/dcforum/dcboard.cgi?conf=DCConfID8

*****************************************