Dublin Airport: Passengers arriving too early to be put in designated holding area 

Dublin Airport fell "extremely" short of its obligations to passengers on Sunday. Picture: PA Wire

Passengers who arrive too early for their flights at Dublin Airport this weekend will be put in a designated holding area as part of plans to avoid travel chaos this bank holiday weekend.

Dublin Airport fell "extremely" short of its obligations to passengers due to a spike in passenger numbers and the absence of 37 staff, its CEO will tell an Oireachtas committee as he outlines what the airport will do so the scenes are not repeated. 

Dalton Phillips, the CEO of Daa, will tell the Transport Committee today that this weekend will see a "focusing on passenger experience improvements across three core areas" with the airport also introducing "new escalation and triage mechanisms in the event of any unanticipated issues arising".

Mr Phillips will say Daa has submitted a detailed plan which focuses on:

• Maximising the availability of staff resources 
• Increasing the number of security lanes open at peak times 
• Improving queue management 

He will reiterate advice to passengers due to fly out of Dublin Airport that they should arrive at the airport at least two and a half hours before the departure of short-haul flights to Europe and the UK and at least three and a half hours for long-haul flights.

"At times when the terminals get particularly busy, we will be triaging access to the terminals and only allowing departing passengers into the departures level that have flights departing within two and a half hours to short-haul destinations and three and a half for long-haul destinations.

"Passengers that arrive too early for their flights will be asked to wait in a dedicated passenger holding area with special consideration being given to those passengers who require special assistance and those Important Flyers travelling with autism.

"For departing passengers, access to the appropriate terminals will be controlled and will require the presentation of documentation indicating the time of flight such as a booking confirmation or boarding card.

Mr Phillps will say Daa "will put in place bad weather cover, seating, and toilets in the holding area as quickly as possible in the coming days following trialling of this system over the June bank holiday weekend."

Mr Philips will add the chaos which saw over 1,000 people miss flights on Sunday was due to an unprecedented demand and a number of missing staff.

"There are three key factors which have led us to the current situation. First, the entire global aviation industry is currently experiencing a rapid and accelerating recovery in passenger numbers at a rate that nobody predicted. In fact, most predicted a return to pre-pandemic levels would not return until 2024 or 2025 at the earliest. 

"Every credible rating agency, analyst and industry body had predicted that, during 2022, traffic levels would remain at less than 70% of 2019 levels. 

Dublin Airport planned for a return to 75 to 80% of 2019 levels. However, by May, traffic going through Terminal 1 alone was at 95% of 2019 levels.

"To put this in context, on average during May, the airport has handled almost 16,500 extra passengers every single day which no one in the industry had predicted six months ago.

"Second, we have faced significant challenges in ensuring that the airport has sufficient people, particularly in security screening, to process these huge levels of passengers. When the pandemic hit, Dublin Airport’s passenger numbers fell from 100,000 per day to just a few hundred. Our business was losing €1m every single day. 

"The consensus was that we would face a long, slow recovery. As a result, we were facing the future as a business that was significantly bigger than industry demand could sustain. We took the difficult decision of reducing staffing levels across our business by 25% between 2020 and 2021.

Recruitment issues 

Mr Phillips added: "Understandably, a key question that we are asked is: why did we not recruit more quickly, during 2021, once it became clear that a recovery was underway? It is important to be clear that Daa did commence recruitment at significant levels immediately at this stage in 2021. We continued this recruitment into early 2022, to ensure that the business would have more than enough people to meet anticipated demand. 

"However, as a result of new EU Enhanced Background Checks we faced huge challenges in bringing these people on board, none of which related to the employment terms on offer. Consequently, we lost 40% of the new security staff we had recruited, with the remainder having to wait an additional seven weeks before they could start in our business. This created a big resourcing gap that we have been working to address ever since.

"Third, and to compound matters, the start of 2022 brought exceptional levels of absence due to Covid-19, with up to 25% of all security staff absent during the start of the year. "

Mr Phillips will outline just how Sunday saw people stuck in queues for over five hours, saying the loss of huge numbers of staff was key.

"On Sunday last, we had rostered and resourced staff to meet the demands of serving 50,000 departing passengers across both Terminals 1 and 2 with 250 security officers and a further 24 Team Supervisors and Coordinators. This would have allowed us to open sufficient security lanes and x-ray machines to cater for the first wave of departing passengers.

"However, on the day we were down 37 officers – 17 of these were new recruits which our rostering system had anticipated would have completed training to allow them to work last Sunday but they had not yet been certified. 

This anomaly has since been resolved in our processes. We also incurred a loss of 20 officers that were absent from work on the day.

"Many of those 37 staff have particular clearances and certifications required to open and operate a lane and so they cannot be readily substituted by other Daa staff. Without this capacity, we were unable to bring in substitute staff at short notice in the early hours of Sunday morning. This compounded the queueing problem throughout much of Sunday. The impact of this reduction in our anticipated human resources meant that we were unable to open 6 security lanes, 3 in each terminal, a loss of 30% during the first wave."

He will tell the committee that each lane ordinarily screens 200 passengers per hour and being down six lanes, the airport had a processing deficit of 1,200 passengers an hour.

The CEO will also apologise for the incident and say that no passenger who missed flights will be out of pocket.