Process chaos at London Heathrow

Having had the misfortune to pass through London Heathrow airport twice in the last few weeks I can personally vouch for the chaotic, careless, rude and unprofessional way in which that airport is processing its customers since the latest round of safety threats regarding UK to US flights and the threat of liquid explosives.

I fully acknowledge the (unfortunate) need for enhanced security measures and the added stress this entails for all parties in the international travel supply chain - however, the operations and behaviour I witnessed and experienced by the Heathrow systems and people was dismaying and disgraceful.

I traveled through LHR almost 3 weeks, and then again 4 weeks, after the security alert regarding liquid explosives occurred and I naively thought that they would have had their act together and systems and processes in place to be able to efficiently handle the congestion that the enhanced security measures would cause. I was sadly, badly and madly wrong - this place is a disaster. I am writing this 10 days later and it still makes me angry.

Let's just quickly summarise those additional security measures (which weirdly enough were rather inconsistently applied):

• reduced size hand luggage (a wooden board was attached to the top of the steel "does your hand baggage fit in here" frame - basically halving the width of the acceptable bag. Interestingly if your bag had soft sides and malleable contents and you could literally wrestle it through the slot that was OK! And business/first class was not restricted - I don't think terrorists intent on personal annihilation would be concerned about the price of the ticket they bought but obviously not a concern for LHR.
• no liquids or pastes of any sort allowed in hand luggage - very distressing for a lot of women who had to abandon their perfume and cosmetics
• all pocket contents, belts and footwear to be scanned at the security checkpoints into the departure areas
• thankfully they had relaxed the "no notebooks, cameras, mobile phones etc" policy as apparently a huge volume of these had been stolen during the period this was applied and I didn't want to join that statistic (says a lot about the security vetting in the HR recruitment process and exit controls for employees when thousands of expensive, portable items can be willfully stolen so easily).

OK - fair enough - restrictions were called for - although the smaller hand baggage allowance was certainly very inconsistently applied as I looked at people going through ahead of me all booking into similar flights and destinations - however I digress.

The nightmare started at dawn when arriving at Terminal 4 and transferring to Terminal 1 for a connecting flight. The human congestion was so bad that even the transfer buses were backing up, unable to disgorge their tired and grumpy passengers due to the queues ahead in the processing area. And this is where the shocking process and behaviour occurred.

Imagine a queue of many hundreds if not thousands, of passengers pouring in from all destinations and connecting on to many more being funneled into a single queue for security processing at the very front - idiocy. I got to the top of the queue to be told that my hand luggage, that had been acceptable out of Australia, was now too big for the new regime, so I had to join a different queue to check it in to the hold for my connecting flight. That's OK, I am happy to do that, but why have me wait in a line for 45 minutes to get that instruction? A sign and a size tester at the start of the queue would have had me processed and out of the way in seconds. Madness. And it was the same for fluids and pastes, only when you got to the top of the queue were you told there was another queue for those (and a tiny table on which to dump your offending liquids absolutely groaning under the pile of discarded items - this was not day one of the change - where was the big dumper bin?).

Throughout this nightmare a couple of uniformed comptrollers paraded up and down rebuffing all pleads for assistance in meeting tight connecting flight times - I literally heard an official snarl to an elderly woman in tears "that is your place in the queue now stay there" - disgraceful. (At another potential "flash point" area the supposed crowd management official was sitting behind a desk reading a novel whilst queue jumpers barged the doors and elderly couples started to faint).

So - that is my rant - but could I have done better? I don't know, I don't work in the business, I don't understand the constraints of the location, staffing, job demarcation, emergency legislation etc and haven't been exposed to their disaster/emergency planning and change management challenges. However, call me old fashioned, call me a fool, some simple "streaming" via large (and cheap) signage and cheery folk guiding and advising at the start of the queue would have been a massive productivity improvement in my opinion.

"If your bag doesn't fit in the size-slot go right - If you have fluids and pastes go left - If you have connecting flights within X mins from now join that queue - Everyone else join this queue". Not rocket science, not expensive, not hard, not training intensive.

How about having announcements in the buses on the way to the terminals - "you will soon be arriving at Terminal 1 and the security procedures are as follows ...... Please note that these will strictly be enforced and we advise you to pay attention to the signs and officials as you get off the bus" - hey, have it in a couple of languages too.

The Heathrow passenger processing methods were disgraceful, their communication was shocking, their people training would appear to have been appalling and there was no sign of improvement a week later when I did it all again so there was no intention of improvement. Very sad and a lesson in "how not to" for all of us interested in process.