With the ghost of last summer’s chaotic travel season hanging overhead, officials at Canada’s busiest airport are saying ‘never again.’
One of the highest-profile operational meltdowns involved mass mishandling of baggage, and Toronto Pearson International Airport is not prepared to tolerate a repeat this summer.
The Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA) enacted a new policy in APR, The Globe reports, that penalizes ground handling companies if crews are not prepared to work when aircraft arrive or are prepping to depart, or if they fail to have enough equipment in place.
Baggage and ground handlers’ work is being monitored by airport officials, who have issued a “Pearson standard” of performance that includes the maximum time allowed for certain operations including delivering all luggage into the terminal.
Those standards have to be met in order for baggage handling companies to be permitted to renew licences to operate at the airport. Major airlines using their own ground handlers also face sanctions, as do all airlines failing to meet the "Pearson standard" of ground performance.
“We’re not looking to make this a profit centre,” the chief executive of the GTAA, Deborah Flint, said. “We’re looking to change behaviour” that ensures passengers’ luggage is handled properly and airlines get their aircraft into and out of gates on time to avoid a snowball effect on the entire operations of the airport.
“If you’re consistently late to the gate with your aircraft, it has a ripple effect on every other aircraft. You’re not going to get access to the gate,” she said.
According to Flint, sanctions and penalties are part of a new “posture and culture change” that has zero tolerance for slip-shod work.
Holding “partners accountable… for delivering” is necessary for the airport to have “certainty” that its operations will run smoothly, she told the Globe.
Since the new policy was issued in APR, YYZ has imposed $100,000 in fines against ground handlers, based, it says, on “the level of impact they are having on the system.”
YYZ is not alone in cracking down on unacceptable ground handling.
As Open Jaw reported, in MAR, YOW canned one baggage handler used by Sunwing and Flair, saying in a release, “The service levels passengers have had to endure do not meet the customer experience threshold the OIAA is committed to facilitate." YOW officials said ground marshalling and baggage services provided by Menzies had "reached untenable levels” and the company would no longer be permitted to operate at the airport, forcing those airlines to find new service providers.
