Geneva airport, vacation week
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - A very small number of Geneva airport’s Swissport baggage handlers remain on strike after lengthy negotiations with cantonal officials failed to bring about a settlement by 8 January. Airline passengers took little interest in the striket, faced with their own concerns about lost bags and missed flights: bags misplaced a week ago have still not all been found and UK weather forced scores of flights to be canceled.
GenevaLunch has been flooded with e-mails and comments on our articles about the chaos at the airport 2-3 January, which resulted in thousands of bags going missing for most of the week.
For those who have still not received their bags, or who were bumped from canceled flights to the UK, due to weather, this week, Swiss law provides the same compensation as European Union law. Details are available in German, French and Italian, the national languages, on a federal government site. Key points include:
Geneva airport
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – A small group of Swissport employees, backed by the public sector employees’ union SSP, will continue to strike at Geneva’s Cointrin airport Tuesday, after negotiations broke down Monday afternoon, 4 January. The group is estimated to be 50 by the union, about a dozen by the airport and Swissport, which handles baggage at Cointrin. The strike is not currently disrupting flights.
Swissport employees from Zurich were sent to Geneva to help with the bags Saturday, and Geneva cantonal police and firefighters as well as customs police worked to keep the system moving Saturday and Sunday.
A larger group of about 160 employees from Swissport and Dnana went on strike Saturday 2 January, one of the busiest passenger days of the year for the airport. Most were back at work Monday. Swissport has several thousand employees in Switzerland.
Airport spokesperson Bernard Staempfli told GenevaLunch Monday morning that thousands of bags had not been delivered, but they would be leaving Geneva during the day Monday. He apologized for the confusion and inconvenience to passengers, while noting that the strike was carried out by employees of a private company which operates at the airport and that the airport is not directly involved in the collective contract negotiations.
Passengers, particularly in the UK, were complaining Monday evening that they were still unable to get any information about their missing bags.
Link to ats/TSR (Fre)
Background, GenevaLunch
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The hottest change in the airline industry is the rapid move to BCBP, bar code boarding passes, whose use has nearly doubled in the past year. By the end of 2010 airports should have 100 percent BCBP coverage, meaning that airlines should be able to adopt this service if they want to, allowing anyone with any type of mobile phone to check in by showing the bar code from his or her phone: the end of the paper check-ins. The change is a particular boon for people who are traveling and who don’t have easy access to printers, possibly most airline passengers. Currently, 115 airlines use this and another 23 plan to.
Iata, at its annual media conference in Geneva Tuesday 15 December outlines some of the other improvements passengers will see in coming months, with the goal of moving people through airports faster.
