Manchester Airport's managing director vowed to put the travel chaos of last year behind them.
During the summer, Manchester airport was at the forefront of chaos as thousands of travellers had their journeys severely impacted by delays, cancellations or poor planning. Images surfaced of hundreds of bags being left behind in favour of getting through the process sooner along with snaking lines stretching from the check-in desk right out to the back of their carparks.
Several members of senior staff left their posts amid mounting pressure. The current managing director of Manchester Airport, Chris Woodroofe, has promised holidaymakers a very different summer experience next year.
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Mr Woodroofe, who took up the role in June this year after the resignation of former MD Karen Smart, said 750 extra airport staff have now been recruited since January, with 200 more set to take up positions between now and Easter next year ready for the summer months.
He said: "There will be nobody doing laps of the airport stood in car parks - that's behind us." Asked what passengers could expect from the airport over the 2023 summer getaway, he told the MEN : "It will be at least as good as 2019. If they are doing the comparison with 2022, they should actually be thinking 'this feels better'. It will be different. I talk about a step change in improvement."
Figures for the month so far released by the airport reveal 97.1 per cent of passengers got through security in less than 30 minutes. More than seven million people travelled away on holiday, for business or to visit friends and family overseas between April and the end of September, and the airport expects to see 600,000 passengers through the gates over the October half-term, with the most popular destinations including Dubai, Dublin, Tenerife, Antalya and Majorca.
Mr Woodroofe said: "The team have really been working very hard and have thrown the kitchen sink at turning around the situation that was well reported in April and May. It's on the up from a not great place, but you can see the pathway.
"I was out very early on saying 95 per cent of passengers in a queue for less than 30 minutes, to set an expectation for the summer. As you sit here now and look back, we actually managed manged 97 plus per cent. 30 minutes is a long time to be stood in a queue, no question, but in the summer of 2022, we just wanted people to get on their holidays.
"The team worked really hard and I have made a real effort to make sure I have gone out and thanked them. Everyone has worked really hard, and it can be a bit of a thankless task.
"Now it's all about, 'ok, how do we look forward to getting back to a really decent experience in the summer of 2023?' That's the focus now. Making sure that we are prepping for that. We have recruited 750 people since January and we still have 200 more to go.
"The 200 to go is the 200 I want on April 1, 2023, and I would like them to be experienced. We want them all in the door by April so by the time we get to the peak summer, they are experienced."
He said passengers should expect to see more staff and shorter queues. He added: "No question. We shouldn't be talking about a 30-minute queue in the summer of 2023. We should be talking about what percentage of passengers should be in for 15 minutes, not 30 minutes."
Asked what the typical experience for a Manchester Airport passenger was today, he said: "It is starting to get to be more like 2019 to be honest. I think that if you get to the other side of half-term, then it really will start to feel like 2019.
"Half-term is a peak and so in the context of us still building that resource pool, the sense that those passengers will have will be like the back end of summer, so the vast majority of them are going to be in a queue for security for less than 30 minutes. 80 plus per cent of them queue for less than 15 minutes today."
He said there would always be a degree of queuing at security and check-in. He added: "There will be nobody doing laps of the airport stood in car parks - that's behind us."
Mr Woodroofe said the current guidance to passengers was they should arrive at the airport no more than three hours before their flights, and said passengers would start to see shorter queues for restaurants and hospitality inside terminal departure lounges.
Recruitment, he said, has been focused on security, as it builds dependent on passenger numbers. The director added: "Between now and Easter I want to recruit the 200 in order to have the exact right number of people for the summer on April 1," he said. The amount of recruitment that we should be doing in April, May, June of 2023 should be very small."
On baggage handling, he said the airport had no 'commercial mechanism to influence it'. He said: "I have met the global director of operations for Swissport, not the UK managing director, and we have sat at this airport and had a conversation about the summer of '22 and how unacceptable it has been and the plans to make the summer of '23 considerably better.
"She said, much like me, that she was building her resources over this winter and training her resources over this winter because just like me, she doesn't want to have a mountain to climb come January and February 2023. She wants to have almost all the people there."
He said over the summer, the airport paid for extra staff to help the airlines get bags off planes and to passengers and said: "Next summer I am planning on doing even more of that. It is so frustrating to have those passenger complaints come in. Next summer I want to do more - an even bigger resilience team of Manchester Airport people.
"I am going to say to each of the handling agencies 'I want your plan for the summer' and I am going to mark it.
"Having got the plan, then we will carry on marking their homework in that if they say they are going to have 100 extra people by this date, well I can check. We will go and do more assurance... to check they are actually then going to deliver and it wasn't just a piece of paper that they sent me to keep me quiet."
The Manchester Evening News has also reported distressing stories of passengers with disabilities who need special assistance being left on board planes or struggling at the airport.
Mr Woodroofe said in September, the airport had the busiest day in its history of 'passengers with reduced mobility'. He said: "The challenge is you only have to get it wrong once and it's very difficult after that," he said. "They are our most vulnerable passengers and they therefore need our most care to be given to them.
"On my day two I had the managing director of the third party contract company come in. I met them and I said this is an area that I am personally, you know, it goes beyond, you have a certain set of responsibilities as the managing director of an airport. We just have to get this right and in June, we were not doing.
"The improvement I have seen, I have been impressed with. They have really made some improvements." He vowed every time an incident happens, the airport would 'get into the absolute detail and figure out what could you possibly have done better to fix it'.
The airport's new T2, meanwhile, opened in July last year. Mr Woodroofe hailed its performance so far and said: "What's going to be even better next year, once we've got the operation back into really good nick, as a facility its wonderful, what we definitely are now looking at is finishing the job.
"The older half now needs to be refurbished and that was paused because of Covid. We are not quite ready to make the big announcement. It is absolutely on top of our agenda to get on with and finish because that means we will be able to close T1. Do the new bit, new bits done, get the airlines out of T1 in there and shut T1."
Mr Woodroofe defended the airport's parking costs - so often a source of complaint. He said there were a number of different 'parking products' and charges themselves were 'in many ways set by the market rather than us'.
He added: "There are other competitors out there that we compete with. We don't decide at the start of the year you know, 'here are our prices' and that's the rate. Actually what happens is, just like airline tickets, you pay the price depending on what is happening in the market place.
"A huge amount of demand and not enough supply, the price is higher. And when there's lots of supply and not even demand, the price is lower."
He said drop-off charges were now common at all airports and it was 'factually correct' to say the movement of vehicles had become far better around the airport as a result.
"If you think about the sums of money that are made, that money ultimately is either allowing the airport to keep its charges to airlines down - so as the cost of their ticket is lower - or ultimately ends up going back to Manchester city council or the nine other boroughs and invested that way, or indeed into a transport fund where we make specific contributions in the context of transport to make improvements to the transport network."
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