Three hours from arrival at Barcelona airport this Monday morning to passing passport control to fly to the United States. It is the time that a passenger, whose testimony has been collected by this newspaper, had to wait in El Prat to board his plane due to the accumulation of travelers in the police filter.
Friday, May 13 at 10 a.m.: a dozen intercontinental flights land in a matter of two hours in Barcelona. The queue at the controls for non-EU passengers extends a few dozen meters. "We won't get out of here in at least an hour," lamented an American couple. “It happens more and more frequently because there are few police officers, and the passengers get nervous; I was rebuked the other day by a Dutchman who was missing a connecting flight because of the queue,” an airport worker told La Vanguardia.
The situation has been repeated even more intensely at other Spanish airports in recent weeks due to a sharp increase in passengers and the shortage, according to the airlines, of police officers in passport control – not at the airport itself. Long lines, congestion, waiting and missing flights. And the effects of Brexit: the United Kingdom, one of the largest source countries for tourists, has ceased to be a community member and now has stricter border controls.
Barcelona, however, is not the worst airport. "In El Prat the incidents are punctual, the most serious problems are occurring in Barajas, Palma de Mallorca, Alicante or Tenerife Sur", the companies consulted insist. On Monday of this week, when Iberia sounded the alarm about the chaos in the queues, there was also a failure in the digital passport system that worsened the flow of travellers, sources from the airline sector explain.
The congestion in this filter has thus been installed in Spanish tourist airports at the gates of summer, something that companies have been warning about for months and that the Government has arranged to solve at the end of this month with a reinforcement of 500 agents at checkpoints. Companies have welcomed the step taken by Interior. “It is the right direction for the summer to be positive”, they point out from Iberia, waiting for the increase in troops to be applied and to see how it works in a summer season that is expected to be almost the same as before. After the pressure exerted by the airlines in recent days, and which has upset the Interior, the companies have chosen to keep the hatchet. “We know that Aena has sufficient resources, that Enaire has increased the air traffic controller workforce and we hope that with these Interior measures we can solve the last remaining cloud”, which was the document filter, said yesterday, in a conciliatory tone, Javier Gándara, president of the ALA airlines association.
But the recovery of passengers and the correct arrival of tourists by plane to Spain does not depend only on the country's airports and the control of the Interior borders. Strikes, delays and flight cancellations have occurred at Europe's main airports since Easter. In Italy there was a black day yesterday due to a strike by Ryanair, easyJet and Volotea workers that forced the cancellation of 360 flights and affected 4,000 passengers, Reuters reported. And for today, the Charles de Gaulle airport is facing a day of protests by its workers, for which the airlines have had to cancel 25% of the flights scheduled for the morning. After two years at a minimum, the airline sector is struggling to bring its operations up to date.
