If you go on Christmas vacation from Zurich airport with Swiss, you risk taking off with some delay. And on the way back, you might not find your luggage.
In an interview with “NZZ am Sonntag”, Oliver Buchhofer, chief operating officer of Swiss, notes that “our punctuality is around 10% lower than it was before the pandemic”.
The company nevertheless improved its punctuality by more than four percentage points, to 65%, in mid-December, while having carried significantly more passengers and carried out more flights than in 2023. A satisfactory result but “still far away of its punctuality objective of 70%” for this year.
However, Oliver Buchhofer believes that Swiss is not only responsible for the delays, but also the airport and Skyguide, responsible for air safety and the coordination of landings and takeoffs.
According to him, in terms of security, which is an absolute priority, the possibilities have not yet been fully exploited. “For example, we could test once to route more flights to Zurich during the day, with the number of approaches per hour granted. At Swiss we have plans in case there are too many. We would then, for example, land all the planes and delay takeoffs (editor's note: to avoid accidents). We would like to test such approaches. And if they don’t work, we would quickly abandon them.”
For the operations manager, it is not a question of finding a culprit given the complexity of an airport. Swiss is thus “in close contact with Skyguide” and the dialogue is constructive, he notes. But he would like the necessary measures for travelers to be taken more quickly: “We must now rediscover the old Swiss virtues. Reliability and consistent cooperation.”
Twice as many luggage lost in Kloten
Swiss registers around twice as many bags that do not arrive as expected than before the pandemic, admits Oliver Buchhofer: “Across our entire network, the lost baggage rate was 2.3% in mid-December. In Zurich it is around 4%.” In particular, the modernization of the baggage sorting system at Kloten airport and the related breakdowns are at issue. However, in the event of problems at the airport, it is Swiss which bears all of its passengers' costs – lost luggage, delays and hotel nights.
Ten million francs in compensation
During the first nine months of 2024, in addition to hotel and meal costs, Swiss had to pay more than 10 million francs in compensation to its passengers. The financial incentive to prevent such problems “is certainly not as high among the partners as it is with us,” believes Oliver Buchhofer.
