What’s going on at Heathrow ?

Unfortunately there's been chaos at Heathrow for the past couple of weeks.

www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jul/23/queues-cancellations-chaos-what-has-gone-wrong-at-heathrow

Lots of flights cancelled/re-scheduled, not enough security staff, huge queues at Immigration on entry, lack of ground staff, and so on.

My flights to Toulouse and back in a couple of weeks have been re-scheduled to inconvenient times, that's if they go ahead at all!

And the government here have a cheek to criticise the French for the problems at Dover.

Sydney airport isn’t crash hot. They tend to lose your luggage, especially Qantas who are short staffed because that disgusting Irishman (who shall remain nameless) sacked most of the staff. He didn’t take a pay cut himself, of course.

There are problems at airports in other countries due to staff shortages, not just Heathrow. I know the USA have similar issues and in France there have been strikes amongst staff, just don’t feature prominently in our news.

It’s not just the U.K.
Swedish friend told me just the other day how her son and DiL plus 3 kids, had their flights from Stockholm to Italy cancelled last minute because of a strike by SAS.

He had a devil of a job to rebook for them all together, eventually had to go via Vienna.

Recently they had much the same sort of chaos and delays with passport applications, too - possibly even worse, since theirs are valid for only 5 years.

I have heard that Schipol is also having problems. I guess everyone wants to travel now the lockdowns have stopped. Someone rang one of our radio stations and said they were, literally, totally stuck at Heathrow and had called the embassy about it as they couldn’t get home to Australia any time soon.