As if things couldn’t get crazier at the European airports, another bizarre situation is now happening in Frankfurt, Germany where airport operators are begging passengers to stop checking in black-colored suitcases.
Apparently, there is now so much baggage left behind at the storage Facilities of Frankfurt Airport that it’s extremely hard to track down bags based on description due to black being the most popular color.
I don’t quite understand why this would be a reason to now ask people not to travel with black suitcases as I doubt anyone will go luggage shopping just to satisfy this demand.
German media such as Merkur and BILD is reporting about this appeal by airport operators to passengers and is ridiculing the situation.
… Frankfurt Airport advises travelers to provide their suitcases with address data – and contradicts the police.
The situation is apparently particularly precarious when it comes to handling suitcases. According to BILD, 2,000 stranded suitcases are still stored in a secret storage facility. So that the chaos doesn’t get any bigger than it already is, Frankfurt Airport is asking passengers for help and giving insane tips.
For example, Fraport published a “suitcase know-how” on its website. A request from the airport still sounds harmless: Waiting times at the baggage carousel should be taken into account when organizing the journey home. And: In the evening hours, “there could be considerable delays in baggage claim.”
In addition to the suitcase chaos, flight passengers are threatened with further trouble: At Lufthansa, a pilot strike is still possible in the summer.
Things get adventurous when it comes to “General tips for luggage”. Thomas Kirner, Head of Passenger Communications at Fraport AG, advises travelers to “only carry one piece of hand luggage” and generally reduce their luggage.
The airport recommends providing suitcases with your own address data in order to be able to allocate them more easily and quickly. The police constantly point out not to do this, as it opens the floodgates to burglars and thieves.
After all, Fraport tries to hold the passengers partly responsible for the suitcase chaos. “Many travel with a black trolley case – that makes identification very time-consuming,” Kirner notes.
Luggage should rather be individualized with a “sticker, a colorful luggage strap, a sign stuck on with fabric tape, suitcase covers or even a piece of gift ribbon on the handle”. …
It’s definitely not recommended to openly display your address on a suitcase but in general, having a baggage tag with personal details is always a good idea. Whenever I check a bag, I fill out one of the foldable airline-provided name tags by hand and add the flight details as well.
It must be a nightmare to reconcile all the thousands of checked bags that are currently in the bowels of European airports, but I don’t believe that employees are running around looking for them based on the description given when filing the lost baggage report. That would be impossible. I bet they simply scan the baggage tags with the tag numbers that will then be pulled up from the search database.
For purposes of tracing a bag, it can also be useful to add an Apple AirTag to the luggage so that you can at least see where a lost bag is located at any given time. This doesn’t help much to get the airline to locate it but in case that a passenger wants to go to the airport and try to retrieve the suitcase in person.
Frankfurt Airport is suffering from a staff shortage in many areas such as security, ground services, check-in, and baggage handling. It’s unclear how long it will take the airport operator Fraport to clear this and find candidates to hire. One of the issues is the lengthy police background check that can take up to six months which makes it impossible to hire and train people who would start their job on short notice.
Conclusion
Frankfurt Airport is giving passengers bizarre instructions on how to prepare their baggage and even what color of suitcases to choose. The amount of stranded bags is so overwhelming that airline and airport employees are unable to process them anymore in an efficient manner.
According to the Fraport website, passengers should avoid using black-colored suitcases as those are the most common and therefore hard to identify in the masses of bags. Quite honestly, if you have several thousand bags all mixed together, then the color won’t make much difference, and I doubt it even matters at all.
If colors are really the problem, then why don’t they sort stranded suitcases by color to begin with? It’s a bloody mess. If at all possible, try to travel with carry-on only when flying in Europe and ideally have decent travel insurance that covers lost baggage as well.
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