The CEO of Groupe ADP Augustin de Romanet, on May 18, 2021 at Roissy airport, near Paris (AFP / Eric PIERMONT)
The episode of undelivered luggage during the strike at Roissy-Charles De Gaulle in early July is “catastrophic” for the image of the Paris airport, said Tuesday the CEO of Groupe ADP Augustin de Romanet, who presented his ” apologies”.
“It’s catastrophic, it’s the image of our airport that has been damaged,” he said on RMC, estimating that “much more” than 20,000 pieces of luggage were overdue following a ” extremely regrettable episode” on July 1, during a strike by ADP employees.
“Even if the causes are multiple, at the origin of things (…), it is the ADP group and ADP collaborators, who normally had to be there at 5:00 a.m. to launch what are called baggage sorters, who had told us the day before the strike that they would be there, and who did not come,” he said. “Instead of starting at 5:00 a.m., they started between 7:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m.”
Some 220,000 bags are sorted every day at Roissy in 17 baggage sorters.
All of the outstanding baggage should be returned to their owners on Wednesday evening, in particular thanks to ADP teams coming in the evening “voluntarily” to help with their flow, according to him.
Augustin de Romanet also recalled that it was not necessary to arrive “too early” to catch your plane.
When “passengers come very early, the luggage cannot be put in the sorters, it is put in what are called storage devices”.
These storers can handle 5,000 pieces of luggage, “but at the moment we sometimes have 50,000 so you have a kind of traffic jam of luggage which creates disorder”, he explained.
For an international flight, you must arrive “regarding 3 hours before” take-off, “no more than two hours” before a flight in the Schenghen area and “an hour, an hour and a half” for a domestic flight.
Staff shortages are limited, he finally noticed, assuring that “it will not be the apocalypse this summer at airports”.