Gatwick The Christmas Scrooge

On Christmas Eve the north terminal at Gatwick airport was experiencing significant problems, dozens of flights were cancelled as systems couldn’t cope with the large amount of people wanting to get away for Christmas. Despite a lot of departures switching to south terminal and engineers working on fixing the issues tirelessly a lot of people were left stranded. The issue wasn’t only the cancelled flights; people weren’t being made aware that their flight was cancelled until 11 or 12 hours after it was scheduled creating massive crowds of unhappy customers.

The scene was of utter chaos as people began to panic amidst the confusion, the screens had no information so people were clueless as to what they should do. No staff where visible as they had left, another issue came when the trains were cancelled to and from the airport as people tried to head home leaving them quite literally stranded.. Gatwick have predictably apologised saying “we remain incredibly apologetic and are desperately trying to put things right but it will take the time it takes in terms of getting it right.”, since they have however given compensation to passengers.

An estimated 10,000 people did not get to their desired destination, the airport on their own tumblr page have announce that to everyone that was affected by the disruptions on Christmas eve as part of its goodwill scheme it will give passengers a £100 voucher each and will reach people within 28 days of the application for the payment, you have to contact them via email to get this. An expensive one for the airport as they would have lost money for the delays on top of the £1,000s they will lose in having to give away the high street vouchers.

They say the issues were caused by exceptionally heavy rain and adverse weather conditions which flooded the switch rooms causing temporary loss of power to the North Terminal.