Groundfarce (2)

I have complained before about baggage reclaim at Lisbon airport. Now the situation appears a little clearer:

• ANA airports is a State-owned company that has to get as fat as possible before its privatisation.
• As such it has no performance objectives (just like PT and EDP before their sale, and Galp to this day).
• ANA put its handling out to contract, choosing the cheapest proposal regardless of any evaluation of quality of service.
• The winning bid, by Groundforce, is based on exploiting its workforce to the maximum.
• The workers have finally grown tired of the conditions offered by Groundforce and have gone on strike.

ANA washes its hands of the matter, saying proudly that despite the strike no flights have been cancelled. Groundforce explains that operations have not been significantly hit by the strike.

Of course operations have not been significantly hit. With an average baggage delivery time of 45 minutes without a strike, what's an extra 15-30 minutes to your long-suffering passenger? And what about the other statistic aired this weekend: "Within Europe, TAP is second only to British Airways in the number of lost bags." I hope that's a percentage measure, not an absolute figure. Imagine if TAP managed to lose as many bags as BA, which is immeasureably larger! Of course, the lost bags are TAP's fault, not ANA or Groundforce. I think not.

State-owned monopolies. Don't you just love them? Looks like we'll have to suffer. At least we can make a quick buck on the shares when the privatisation goes through.

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.