Birmingham Airport: Airport slammed as 'absolute disgrace' after passengers miss Ryanair flight to Alicante due to 'crowd crushing' and 'not enough staff'

Birmingham Airport has been slammed as an “absolute disgrace” after passenger’s missed a flight to Alicante in Spain due to “not enough” staff “trained for new scanners”. Simon Porter told NationalWorld that he and his friend missed their Ryanair flight which was scheduled to take off at 8.30am on Monday 29 April, despite turning up before 6am with only carry-on bags with them.

He said several police officers arrived at the airport at around 7.30am “for crowd control due to crushing with only one member of staff present by lifts with only one out of four lifts in intermittent use.” He added: “Passengers were relaying who should try to make their way through by shouting out times with no tannoy, no loud hailer and no signage. 

“We missed our Ryanair flight after turning up before 6am with no luggage for an 8.30am flight. On the day I am reliably informed 800 people missed their flight that morning, that's roughly the equivalent of four aeroplanes, all flights took off as scheduled.”

Mr Porter said he rebooked on the 5.45pm flight to Alicante via mobile and stayed in departures all day. He added that “no food, drink or area was provided by the airport, Ryanair or the Swissair facilities providers.”

He said he believes that the chaos was due to issues in security which he had reaffirmed to him by an airport employee. He said there seemed to “be not enough trained staff for new scanners, not enough scanners online, IT software crashes (nationwide) and people understandably turning up too early.” He added: “It was absolute chaos and unsafe, hence the arrival of police.”

Mr Porter told NationalWorld that “Birmingham Airport management have literally dug their heads in the sand and just blamed the builders”. He said he is flying again from the airport with Jet2 this time and is “dreading it” as he “does not want to spend another 12-hour day there”, adding it was his “worst experience of Birmingham airport or any airport in 52 years.”

A Birmingham Airport spokesperson said: “We are sorry to hear about Ms Sweeney and Mr Porter’s experience at Birmingham Airport, this is not the service we aim to deliver. We can confirm that we are in contact with them and the complaint is with our customer agents to investigate.”