Its that time of year when one decides the alpine snowy peaks are too irresistibly beautiful to decline a visit. So off we go again on to a plane and then a coach to play in the snow. It wouldn't be a holiday if there weren't some kind of trouble on the way. And this time, the first in a long while, it was trouble with the luggage.
The four flights involved took off and landed on time. However, Turin airport seemed ill prepared for the arrival of the bags on board these flights. Immigration services were hugely efficient so there wasn't even much of a queue through passport control but for some reason the bags were delivered to the wrong baggage areas and it took airport personnel, and everybody else, about 1.5 hours to figure this out. Thus, passengers from Bristol and Manchester, who were the first and second of the four groups of passengers to arrive, stood waiting by an empty luggage conveyor belt 3, as indicated by the information screens, for about 1.5 hours wondering why it was taking airport staff so long to deliver their bags from their planes. Maybe it was because it was a Sunday and the airport was short of staff? Meanwhile, passengers from London at belt 4 were amazed that bags started appearing quite soon after they arrived but wondered why the belt seemed to be almost full, with bags which weren't being collected by anyone standing around that area. The bags from London did eventually arrive and as some people picked theirs up they noticed that the flight numbers on some of the baggage tags didn't seem to match those listed on the information screen.
Meanwhile, a few people from the Bristol plane noticed that belt 4 was quite full and, wondering if something may be amiss, went round to belt 4 to check the baggage tags and found that their bags had indeed been delivered to the adjacent luggage belt. They went back to tell their friends and this led to a near stampede of people from belt 3 to belt 4. Unfortunately, the bags from Manchester were not on belt 4 so the passengers from the Manchester plane then proceeded to check from belt to belt to try to find their bags, only to discover that they were no where to be found. So they went back to wait by belt 3. By this point the information screens showed that the bags from Bristol were on both belts 3 and 4, even though belt 3 remained resolutely empty.
The passengers from a plane that had arrived from Newcastle and were waiting on belt 5, caught wind of what was happening and started to wander around looking for their bags. A message came up on their conveyor belt information screen that told them that their bags were being delivered to belt 3 instead so they all went to belt 3 and waited for less than a quarter of an hour when a message then came up to say, sorry but their bags were actually on belt 5. They returned to belt 5 which was still empty when I left about 10 minutes after this. The group from Manchester were also still waiting by belt 3 when I left.
Surprisingly everyone seemed to handle the situation with good humour and laughed at, rather than moaned about, the ridiculous situation. Maybe the prospects of fun in the snow meant that glitches could be overlooked. The magic of holidays.
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