KLM CEO apologizes for bad communication in snow chaos; Dozens of flights canceled today
KLM should have communicated better with passengers who got stranded at Schiphol this week, Marjan Lintel, CEO of the Dutch airline, said on Pauw & De Wit on Thursday. Thousands of flights were canceled due to snow and strong winds. Schiphol’s site lists another 80 canceled flights for Friday, mostly KLM flights.
The winter weather forced KLM to cancel hundreds of flights at Schiphol this past week. Airlines operating at Schiphol have cancelled 48 departures on Friday, mostly KLM flights scheduled in the evening, and 32 arriving flights throughout the day. Stranded travelers interviewed by the media complained that the Dutch airline was providing inadequate information.
“I understand that frustration,” Rintel said on the television program. “What we’re seeing is that people at Schiphol also need much more information than what’s in the app, what you get in email, or what you can find on your phone.”
“The problem, of course, is when you have to rebook 300,000 people and 70 percent of your flights are canceled because there is no capacity at the airport to fly, it’s very difficult to say: you’re going tomorrow, because tomorrow your flight might be canceled again,” Rintel said. “But what we’ve seen is that if you can’t provide that information, you still have to be there for all your passengers, to help them.”
She said that KLM will evaluate the events of the past few days and learn lessons from them. “How can we ensure that we inform our customers better?” the CEO said. “We have to do better than we have done now.”
It isn’t only passengers who are critical of how KLM handled the winter weather this week. According to the pilots’ union VNV, insufficient staff capacity due to KLM’s “policy choices” is also to blame for the chaos at Schiphol.
“It wouldn’t take much for the correct operation to collapse like a house of cards. We’re concerned about that,” the trade union wrote, according to the Telegraaf. KLM CEO Rintel said that there were sufficient staff available, but according to the union, there were not enough drivers for the towing and refueling of aircraft.
"These shortages of technicians and drivers have been going on for quite some time. A recruitment and training plan must be implemented as soon as possible, just as for the technicians. Because if efforts are not made, it will increasingly lead to indifference,” VNV president Ruud Stegers told the newspaper.
