Operations return to normal at Kelowna International Airport – Okanagan | 24CA News
Now that we’re into the brand new 12 months, vacation travellers are heading residence and airports are getting again to their normal operations.
Kelowna International Airport says regardless of all of the challenges, they made it by way of the busiest time of the 12 months.
YLW is loads quieter than it was in current weeks, which is a sigh of reduction for airport employees.
“It’s been very hectic, I mean peak winter operations of the holiday period always is hectic,” stated airport director Sam Samaddar.
“Obviously, we had weather across Canada and North America and it started early through the west coast and channelled through. It’s certainly been a challenging peak period operation,”
YLW has returned to its regular operations with the vast majority of flights departing and arriving on time. One difficulty nonetheless lingering is baggage left over on the airport.
“We’re still dealing with some delayed bags but it’s certainly much smaller amounts. We’ve had certainly a large accumulation of bags that we had to move to other locations just because of the time it’s taken to process them,” Sammadar stated.
In a press release to Global News, WestJet says it’s attempting to do its finest to reunite passengers with their baggage and are working with native airports.
“Our baggage teams across our network have a lot of bags to sort through after the large backlog of cancellations experienced over the holidays,” the assertion learn.
“But they are working around the clock to get them moving and delivered to our guests as fast as possible.”
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Bags are being picked up and shipped out every day to allow them to be reunited with their house owners. However, employees say there may be nonetheless the priority of them being stolen.
“That’s why we have CCTV cameras, we have security patrols. Obviously, we need to give access to the passenger to be able to pick up their bag. There’s certainly a balance in terms of the threat against someone picking up a bag and walking out the door with it,” stated Sammadar.
Samaddar says the airport had contingency plans in place for the chaotic previous few weeks they usually have been nonetheless in a position to ship some optimistic outcomes.
“We kept the runway, for example, open throughout the holiday period, regardless of the weather that was happening. The teams did a great job in dealing with what they were dealt with and trying to help our common passenger.”
Samaddar additionally provides that the delays and points at YLW this vacation season – will function a studying alternative for airport employees.
“The more that we can use technology rather than a manual system to reunite passengers with their bags would be much preferable.”
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