angatol

.....

BasilBush

I don't know why you say that clearance is outside of HAL's control. All the pax screening staff are HAL employees. Yes, they are applying DfT criteria, but it seems to me that the targets should incentivise HAL to provide sufficient staff to ensure that all aspects of the screening process (including secondary search) are undertaken within an acceptable time. The current targets actually incentivise HAL to divert staff away from secondary search, so as to meet the narrowly-defined queuing target. The targets also incentivise HAL to route as many pax as possible through Fasttrack, as the queuing targets do not apply there.

It is a mess.

IAN-UK

My apologies, I thought the chief concern was time taken up by inspections, primary and secondary.

Any wait for the first scan is clearly not going to be recorded: it should be. Time from first to second scan is a metric, but of little use if the passenger frustration index has been building before the first scan is reached.

Please make your thoughts on this known to CAA. Iain Osborne, Group Director for Regulatory Policy, is the man who'd love to hear your views.


The monitoring of queues is terminal specific and part of service quality monitoring: failure to meet targets triggers a rebate ... to the airlines using the terminal. http://www.heathrowairport.com/about...d-bonus-scheme


For December 2014, airlines using T5 received a pro rata rebate on passenger-related charges of over £1million for central security queue and about half that again for transfer security. You can see the rebates by terminal here: http://www.heathrowairport.com/stati...SQRB_Dec14.pdf


Comforting to know the airlines benefit from our misery


Letter from HAL's COO explaining just how difficult it is to deliver those elusive service quality targets .....
http://www.caa.co.uk/docs/78/2014020...thsFailure.pdf

hugolover

Give me 25% of Normand Boivin's salary, CCR Charles to make my end of the day bevvies, the power to make changes or get flamed and I can make improvements in a month.

Banana4321

If the CAA are responsible for the queue but not the scanning then how can they ever be responsible for queue length? It would only take "someone doing their job" in carefully scanning each article and person for a queue to form.

Certainly putting it where it is now is a waste of time and disingenuous

IAN-UK

CAA are responsible for ensuring users of HAL receive a quality of service commensurate with the fees they pay for those services. The agency discharges its responsibility by imposing a number of service quality targets, and agreeing with HAL metrics for assessing compliance with those targets.

Then it's over to HAL to implement the monitoring system and report back monthly to CAA. All very grown-up.

In December (as in many other months) HAL reported it had fallen behind in terms of waiting times in security queues in T5 and received a "fine" (paid to airline users of T5).

CAA does not monitor the performance of the security inspection service in any formal way. But your scenario of a jobsworth holding up the queue by carefully inspecting items isn't likely: passengers undergoing secondary screening are normally taken out of the system and stood in the naughty corner post-scan. The variability in processing time seems to be down to passenger awareness of what's required, the volume of bags and mechanical breakdown.

MadProfessor

Let your feeling be known. You can email [email protected]

BAAZ

For Boots/WH Smith it's for VAT purposes. If you're travelling within the EU then they have to pay VAT on what you're buying (if it's not zero-rated which of course most of what you buy in WH Smith isn't). If you're travelling outside the EU then they don't.

Of course that doesn't affect what you pay, it only affects their VAT bill.

I suspect that if you don't produce a BP they just chalk you up to the next flight to the US as it's cheaper for them.

CraigWatson

I love this idea! ^

BrunswickSq

I would have thought that the quicker we are decanted into Heathrow Shopping Centre the more rent they can charge the duty free shops. More bored passengers waiting for their planes equals higher turnover for those shops (I suspect). The fact that I'm on the Tanqueray in the lounge isn't something they need to know

paulwuk

Also illegal, and I hope that the person doing it (or making the policy if it's a policy) is charged.

paulwuk

The probleem is if it always takes 2 hours to get through security, you turn up 2h40 before. If it always takes 5 minutes, you turn up 45 minutes before. In neither case do you spend time in the shops.

However, if security takes between 2 hours and 5 minutes, you need to turn up 2h40, but will often have an extra hour or so hanging around airtime. Variable security times are good for the primary business of Heathrow Airport.

HarryKUK

The Fast Track lanes at T5 are rarely any quicker than the general lanes, due to the ratio of the two.

Usually South Security has only two lanes open for Fast Track with the remaining 10 or so allocated to general security, but the ratio of users isn't such that this would be helpful. When the queues become really long, their solution is to suspend Fast Track and open all lanes to all passengers, which isn't useful. The only time Fast Track is quick is when all the other lanes are equally quick!

chris1979

the staff tend to encourage pax to scan them when there are no queues so i wonder if there are targets / the staff are aware of how they are doing etc.

i refuse it and I object to the fact that they don't make it clear what it is. I have seen many pax scrambling for their BPs believing they have to scan. which is as annoying and untruthful as the WH Smith "can I have your BP please".

paulwuk

On the flip side the staff say "don't bother" when the queues are terrible