As travel restrictions due to COVID-19 continue to ease, passengers with flights departing from Vancouver International Airport are asked to arrive hours before their scheduled flights.
Johnny Lowe said she arrived 90 minutes before her scheduled flight to Saskatoon earlier this week, only to miss it by minutes due to a long delay at the check-in exit.
“I must have missed my flight at 9:05 a.m. by probably two minutes because of these extraordinarily long and unnecessarily long security groups,” Lowe told CBC News.
“I arrived at the appointed time, but they had closed the security door completely.
She said the long queue stretched the entire length of the airport and by the time she passed the guards, her flight had already taken off.
“We have communication technologies where companies can notify people in minutes, so there’s no reason not to notify, no reason for these unnecessary delays.”
Lack of staff contributes to delays
Mike McNaney, chief external officer at Vancouver International Airport, said the continuing shortage of staff at the Canadian Air Security Authority (CATSA) is contributing to long queues and long delays in handling passengers through airport security.
CATSA is the federal crown corporation responsible for all passenger security checks.
Travelers to Vancouver International Airport in March 2020. The continuing shortage of staff at the corporation responsible for security checks is contributing to the long queues at the airport, said Mike McNaney, its chief foreign affairs officer. (Ben Nelms / CBC)
“What we saw in the last 24 to 48 hours were delays we haven’t seen here before and were worse than anything we’ve experienced before during the pandemic,” McNein told CBC News.
He said the airport handles about 45,000 passengers a day and they expect that number to increase with the busy upcoming summer travel season.
“We certainly have concerns about the summer schedule, when demand will increase even more, and what we are now looking for from CATSA’s management is their short-term plan to address the challenges.”
In a statement to the CBC, CATSA said it advised passengers to arrive two hours in advance for domestic flights and three hours in advance for US and international flights.
“With the resumption of air travel, we are seeing simultaneous peaks that could lead to flooding of passengers at more than one checkpoint at a time, making the redistribution of resources to deal with these numbers of passengers more challenging,” the statement said.
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