Groundfarce Lisbon

It is a long time since TAP outsourced its handling operations. Unfortunately, I have found that the current contractor is awful, and I mean awful.

Take the return from my UK trip last weekend. A fairly full TAP Airbus 319 was duly met, out in the sticks, by its bus and refuelling truck. But where was the baggage lift? We were already all on the bus when the lift trundled up, and took six (yes 1+1+1+1+1+1!) attempts to line the lift up with the baggage hatch. I didn't get to see the operator open the hatch because we were already on our way to the terminal.

Inside the terminal, passport control is much improved from the old days when the few non-Schengen (i.e. UK) flights used to face only two surly SEF employees, with huge queues and grumbling passengers, so it was off to baggage reclaim.

Fifteen minutes later the first bags arrived, one container's worth. And they kept arriving, one container at a time for 40 minutes! Did Groundforce only have one trailer available to bring the containers from the plane, or only one baggage handler to unload the bags from the containers?

And then there was the state of the baggage. Burst vanity cases, broken trolley handles. I was lucky to get away with a rather wet bag which had only lost one zip pull. It wasn't raining in either Heathrow or Lisbon, so I don't know where the water came from. I had never seen such a sorry set of bags going round a reclaim carrousel.

It's a good business technique - outsourcing non-core operations - but there has to be measurement of the quality of the sub-contractor's service. None of us would choose our airline based on the company that does the handling at either end of the trip, but that doesn't mean that the airlines should wash their hands of the question of customer service in this area.