Airport crush
IT was the typical Christmas rush at Kingston’s Norman Manley International Airport yesterday.
New arrivals waited impatiently on immigration officers in fidgety lines, jostling crowds in the customs hall picked over suitcases, boxes and crates moving around on the carousels, and airline passengers grumbling about delayed luggage.
“From Saturday me come from Curacao and all now I can’t get piece a me goods,” complained Alma Anderson.
But Anderson, a Kingston resident, conceded that she had arrived from a shopping trip to the Dutch Caribbean island with a dozen pieces of luggage. And they weren’t small suitcases.
“We do have a lot of delayed baggage,” said Florence Howe, the airport’s acting head of customs operations.
Most of the delayed baggage belonged to higglers, or, as Air Jamaica calls them, informal commercial importers (ICIs), a category of passengers that the carrier insists is important to its business and often goes out of its way to make them feel welcomed.
ICI’s, mainly women, travel regularly to places such as New York, Miami, Panama, Curacao and St Maarten to buy goods most for sale in Jamaican street markets. This time of year the trips are more frequent and not only are the sizes of the luggage greater but so are the number of pieces.
“While the ICIs are a very important part of our passenger traffic, the pieces that we get out of Curacao are enormous and they are not like suitcases that are easily packed,” explained Jacqueline Young, regional manager for Air Jamaica’s customer service. “They are huge, irregular shaped boxes. It makes the packing very difficult in the aircraft hull.”
The upshot is that the airline often has to delay baggage and sometimes put on special flights to transport what is left behind. Air Jamaica sets itself a 96-hour deadline to deliver delayed luggage. “So far we have stuck to our 96-hour commitment,” said Young.
Added to the activities of the ICIs, the thousands of Jamaicans who return home this time of year, mostly from the United States and Britain, bring with them mountains of luggage.
Take yesterday at Norman Manley. Twenty-eight flights were scheduled to arrive by late night, bringing nearly 2,000 passengers. Nineteen of those flights belonged to Air Jamaica, including three each from Fort Lauderdale, Miami and New York and two apiece from Grand Cayman and London.
The airport was teeming. Customs put on extra staff. At mid-afternoon 14 customs officers and two cashiers were on duty at the airport.
“We try to anticipate the arrivals and try to get as many persons as possible to help us with the inflow,” said Howe, the head of customs operations.
“On an average day we deal with in excess of 1,000 persons,” she added. “Sometimes when we have flights full, the number can go up considerably,”
During yesterday’s daytime, she expected about 1,700 arrivals — more than normal but not as many, she reckoned, as past Christmases.
“Even though it is heavy this year, it is not as heavy as in previous years,” Howe said.
Either way, there was a lot of luggage to carry out of the arrival hall once passengers cleared the customs check points. Porters did good business.
“Boy, the amount a bag I lift up and push on trolley since morning, it no pretty,” one porter told the Observer. “Still, we eat more food and the people kinder in Christmas. That mean bigger tips.”
The heavy passenger inflow was also welcomed by car rental companies. The outlets at Norman Manley all reported doing good business.
“We are almost out of vehicles,” said Casey Nembhard of Praise Tours and Auto Rentals.
Usually at Norman Manley a major concern of the police is the traffic — drivers parking in restricted areas or taking too long to drop off or pick up passengers.
Now, with the crowds, there is another concern — pilferage. The police are on the look out for the petty criminals and hustlers.
“This time of year the hustlers come down,” said Constable Theophilus Dunn of the Airport Police. “We have to be careful as people will lose their luggage if they leave it in the care of hustlers. The traffic also builds up a lot more and we have be on the ball.”