T5 baggage heading back to Heathrow after trip to Milan
British Airways drove the bags in a 24-hour trip to a warehouse close to Milan airport to be sorted after T5's baggage management system failed.
Embarrassed managers had hoped to forward them to passengers across continental Europe who had been forced to travel without their luggage in the days after the £4.3bn terminal opened.
But now the airline has admitted that several hundred of those bags are in the process of being trucked and flown back to the UK because their owners finished their holidays and business trips before BA could get their bags to them.
At the beginning of the month as many as 5,000 bags were driven to Milan after at least 20,000 mounted up at T5 during chaotic scenes in which the new terminal's baggage handling systems collapsed and scores of flights were cancelled.
BA's idea was to use the private facility close to Milan airport to re-sort the bags and then forward them by courier to passengers across mainland Europe.
The 780-mile drive from Heathrow to Milan took 24 hours, but sending the bags by truck rather than plane meant security checks could be completed more quickly.
But by the time many of them were finally dispatched from Milan to forwarding addresses, the bags' owners had moved on. Those bags - known as "chasing bags" in the airline industry - are now trickling back into the UK from across Europe. "Hundreds of bags are affected by this, many because they have been forwarded to the place in Europe where the customer was staying, but they have since returned home," said a spokeswoman for BA. "The majority of the bags we sent to Milan have made it to the people in time for their holidays."
Others never made it out of the Milan warehouse and some lost their baggage tags during repeated handling, which has made their owners even harder to trace.
According to union sources, some of the bags from the Milan facility, which is run by Onboard Express, have been trucked directly back to Gatwick, where they are being sorted and then couriered to owners across the UK.
The automated baggage handling system at T5 is still not working as it should be, according to the union source, but BA is understood to have compensated for the problems by increasing the number of baggage handlers working at T5.
"Its all coming together now," the source said. "The system is not working as well as it should be, but the manual operation they have put in place is working quite well. Most of the bags are returning from Milan. However, most of those people the bags were intended for have returned from their trips and many have still not been reunited with their bags."
- Robert Booth and Dan Milmo
- The Guardian,
- Thursday April 17 2008
British Airways drove the bags in a 24-hour trip to a warehouse close to Milan airport to be sorted after T5's baggage management system failed.
Embarrassed managers had hoped to forward them to passengers across continental Europe who had been forced to travel without their luggage in the days after the £4.3bn terminal opened.
But now the airline has admitted that several hundred of those bags are in the process of being trucked and flown back to the UK because their owners finished their holidays and business trips before BA could get their bags to them.
At the beginning of the month as many as 5,000 bags were driven to Milan after at least 20,000 mounted up at T5 during chaotic scenes in which the new terminal's baggage handling systems collapsed and scores of flights were cancelled.
BA's idea was to use the private facility close to Milan airport to re-sort the bags and then forward them by courier to passengers across mainland Europe.
The 780-mile drive from Heathrow to Milan took 24 hours, but sending the bags by truck rather than plane meant security checks could be completed more quickly.
But by the time many of them were finally dispatched from Milan to forwarding addresses, the bags' owners had moved on. Those bags - known as "chasing bags" in the airline industry - are now trickling back into the UK from across Europe. "Hundreds of bags are affected by this, many because they have been forwarded to the place in Europe where the customer was staying, but they have since returned home," said a spokeswoman for BA. "The majority of the bags we sent to Milan have made it to the people in time for their holidays."
Others never made it out of the Milan warehouse and some lost their baggage tags during repeated handling, which has made their owners even harder to trace.
According to union sources, some of the bags from the Milan facility, which is run by Onboard Express, have been trucked directly back to Gatwick, where they are being sorted and then couriered to owners across the UK.
The automated baggage handling system at T5 is still not working as it should be, according to the union source, but BA is understood to have compensated for the problems by increasing the number of baggage handlers working at T5.
"Its all coming together now," the source said. "The system is not working as well as it should be, but the manual operation they have put in place is working quite well. Most of the bags are returning from Milan. However, most of those people the bags were intended for have returned from their trips and many have still not been reunited with their bags."
