ItsWowStyle

Do Star Alliance gold members traveling on a Star Alliance economy flight still get to use the priority security lane?

MasterPengs

I did not notice Privium members going any other way. As SP we went right at the top of the stairs and had maybe 10-15 people in front of us (short zig zag). Once the line got longer behind us, they started sending people to another line off to the left of the stairs.

At the bottom of the stairs Privium members at least got to walk to the front of the queue (left lane for Privium) vs. right lane for SP / biz class.

irishguy28

KLM have posted an advisory regarding the planned road blockade of the airport on Monday 4 July

HadesNL

To add:
https://nos.nl/artikel/2434901-schip...-boerenprotest

Target: Dutch airports: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Eindhoven

In de communicatiekanalen van de boeren wordt ook opgeroepen om naar de luchthavens Eindhoven en Rotterdam The Hague Airport te gaan voor acties.


Advise to take the train to the Amsterdam airport:

Kom aanstaande maandag zo veel mogelijk met de trein naar Schiphol.
Die oproep doet de luchthaven met het oog op de boerenprotesten die dag.

Mess on the roads expected,
Kmar deploying heavy duty equipment :

Vanwege de aangekondigde boerenacties heeft de Koninklijke Marechaussee, die verantwoordelijk is voor de beveiliging op Schiphol, zwaar materieel zoals pantservoertuigen naar de luchthaven gebracht.

atflyer

In the last 5 days I faced 3 cancellations leading to 2 additional forced overnight stays (OSL-AMS on Monday evening cancelled -> rebooked to Tue morning; and yesterday FLR-AMS via Paris cancelled, rebooked on this (Friday) morning flight, again cancelled, rebooked to the evening flight, now home with a 2 hour delayed evening flight FLR-AMS. Survived the whole week on the 3 shirts I packed for the Oslo meeting (managed to buy some extra socks) since I had no choice but to take the FLR flight directly after the OSL return. On Monday afternoon 4 July I am supposed to do AMS-LHR....If that doesn't end up in disaster making me cancelling the whole London trip for sure it is the last one I have booked for a while. Air travel is pure stress at the moment. Any flight can be delayed, any connection missed, any flight can be cancelled. You cannot trust the system anymore. The FLR-AMS captain laconically declared: 'Extremely sorry for the 2 hour delay. This is due to staff shortages everywhere in the flight system. Before landing at AMS we will come back to you how to deal with missed connections and short connections'. Believe at least 20 pax in the 100+ Embraer were affected.

If you have to travel some golden rules - use hand luggage only if you can since you are then in control of your luggage (the piles of suitcase I saw at Schiphol upon exit today was staggering), fly direct if you can, if you can't use flights with lavish transfer time (although this did not help me in the FLR-CDG-AMS thing on Thursday, despite a 3 hour layover in Paris and jus a 1-2 hour delay for the FLR-CDG flight they decided to rebook me 'since I would miss my connection'), fly from airports that are known not to have shortage of security staff, and as for flight times there is a trade off: in the mornings security can be clogged, but in the afternoons and evenings after x rotations planes may have accumulated lots of delays, up to the point that an airline decides simply to skip a return from base-outstation to make up for lost time (which happened to my OSL-AMS flight - the AMS-OSL-AMS stint simply was deleted to make up for the accumulated 2 hours + delay the plane had....

Good luck to all in these crazy times.

GUWonder

Isn’t FLR-AMS by train possible with less than 14 hours of travel time? Talk about an AF-KL mess giving the trains a run for their money in time.

atflyer

Typically 15 hours with 4-5 changes.
https://www.nsinternational.com/nl/t...20220702?pax=A

I am up to a family outing in the Zurich region in July and all night trains are full. KLM obviously rebooked me for free and supposedly is honoring my hotel claim. They had no trains to offer so that would be risky - likely at own costs. But I agree that by now some train trajectories are more safe.

GUWonder

I was thinking Florence-Basel-Paris (EstxNord)-Amsterdam. Sad that it comes to this.

atflyer

On my meeting near Oslo there was this guy that bravely tried the train from the Netherlands. The first train from Utrecht he wanted to take to believe Osnabruck fora a change to Hamburg was delayed, implying all his connections would fall apart and he would arrive far too late. He ended up taking a flight to Copenhagen to catch up with his train schedule again....Trains have similar risks as flights - they can be wonderful if you can go direct (say NL-Paris, London or several places in Germany) or with limited connections, but otherwise......and sadly, trains often are much more expensive as flights still.

BubbaX

The problem with trains is Germany. DB has a 67% on-time rate, so if you have to change anywhere, the odds aren't good.

atflyer

* wanted to delete a double post but only could do this*

jerry_greece

Okay, correspondence from hell. Decided to be risky (and due to less trains as well) I arrived 09.20 for a 11.55 flight. There was some control for accessing the departures level from the train station but only by the moving escalator-thingies and some pax were made to wait (see pic) but of course the normal staircase directly next to it was unmanned, so you could just go up that way (see pic 1)

The priority entrance point behind SkyPriority checkin area (door F) was manned and there was a long queue for people to enter. It was spanning all the way to G door to the airport (see pic 2). Reason is that they allowed only a few pax. to go upstairs, due to the congestion there. A schiphol employee was asking everybody to only wait if they are priority or business otherwise they will turn them away. Same if they have company. "Skypriority is only for you". From discussions of this employee with the crowds, I understood that they were sending pax. for Schengen towards checkpoint in Departures 1, while others at checkpoint in Departures 2. I am not sure what was the impact on waiting time.

I can confirm that there were pax in line with other type of Priority (e.g. Premier with UA), so it is highly likely that this is the entry point for all priority pax. Perhaps that's why the long(er) lines. Privium got the separate entrance there and then same upstairs but then i think there was one line. The check on BPs to enter this access point is visual only. An employee checks your BP (printed or mobile).

Once upstairs, there was some snaking to reach the security checkpoints (see pic 3). That was the bottleneck which toook longer than I expected. I would say that less than half of the 12 stations were open and only one (so 3 positions) were available for the priority pax. Eventually, an employee funneled some pax. to the Departures 1 left-est access point. Not many bags to secondary.

On the bright side, lines for passport control seemed manageable and not long at all.

Overall, from train arrival to lounge was 55 min. (0920 to 1015).

Anish

Thanks for the updates jerry_greece , very helpful!

atflyer

Thanks for this update Jerry Greece! Very useful indeed. I must admit that on a bad day like this 55 min from train to lounge (with SP) in the morning when things usually are worst is reassuring. Sure, in normal times we are used to 15 minutes or less, but this is manageable. I'll sign for it if that is the damage I have to take for my Monday London afternoon flight (of course if the farmers start a war with KMAR around Schiphol all bets are off....).

manuswiss

Thank you for all the updates! I will be flying AMS-ZRH on Swiss on July 10th at 20:00. I have booked business class and I'm hoping to be able to use priority queues.

While I did read many of the posts, it's still not so clear to me if priority queues at security are always available, or if I risk having to stand in line 3 hours with everyone else. Are those priority queues marked somewhere? Are employees actually competent/friendly and do they direct you to the right place when you ask? Or is it pure madness?