DESPITE knowing of the growing problems at Larnaca airport, ministry and airport officials are powerless to do anything about it because of budgetary constraints, reports said yesterday.
Recent scenes at Larnaca airport have been described as “chaotic”. Passengers have many times complained of having to wait for long periods of time for their luggage to be taken off the plane, and whereas the problem used to be occasional, airport officials are now admitting that thousands of passengers a day are being inconvenienced.
The overstretched budget for the airport is the main reason for the decline in airport service, according to one anonymous employee quoted by Politis newspaper yesterday.
“No matter how many hours the airport staff work and how hard they work, the problem will not go away. The fact that we are understaffed is probably the biggest problem at present.”
The problem is compounded by low morale over job uncertainty. The island’s two airports are soon to be handed over to the private sector and redundancies are on the horizon for many employees.
As a result many employees, knowing that they will be made redundant in the near future and will be given redundancy packages, have been taking liberties, abusing sick leave and thus stretching staffing levels.
Meanwhile, scores of travels agents and angry passengers have been calling into newspapers to complain about the dreadful inconvenience they are being subjected to, particularly at the luggage lounge. One Greek passenger told Politis newspaper that she had to wait two hours for her luggage at the airport after arriving from Greece, almost double the time of her flight.
One Irish holidaymaker told the Cyprus Mail, “The whole place was like a town market. You had to push your way with the airport trolley just so you could get close to the conveyor belt and I saw a few cases where people shouted at each other because they bumped into each other. It was not the best start to our holiday.”
A British passenger flying out to Heathrow recently described the departure lounge as “absolute chaos”.
“I have never seen it that busy, people queuing everywhere, tempers fraying and not an official in sight,” Lindsay Tanner said in a letter to the Cyprus Mail.
Meanwhile another passenger who arrived from Madrid on Tuesday told Politis that “stepping into Larnaca Airport was like stepping into a third world country”.
He added: “The announcements were written on a board with chalk and I have not seen anything like that in any European country. Also the toilets were disgraceful. I cannot begin to imagine what the tourists must think of us when they come into the airport for the first time.”
Communications Minister Haris Thrasou was unavailable for comment.
