Union Declares Strike Alert at Prague Airport After Baggage Chaos

co-written by Catherine Cox.

The head of baggage handling at Prague’s airport resigned after hundreds of travelers reported lost luggage, and employees declared a strike alert on Tuesday, threatening to snarl arrivals during the busy summer tourist season.

Tomas Svoboda stepped down from his position as chairman of the board of the airport baggage handling company at Vaclav Havel Airport Prague, airport spokeswoman Klara Diviskova said in a statement.

He’ll be replaced by Jiri Jarkovsky, who said he’ll focus on rectifying the crisis that resulted from the abnormally high airport traffic carrying summer visitors to many popular European cities.

“I believe that we will be able to prevent the situations that have occurred in recent days at the Prague airport,” Jarkovsky said, according to the CTK news agency.

Meanwhile, the Land and Air Trade union said on Monday that they would hold a strike on a date that they will announce later. The union represents 400 of the 2,700 workers at the airport. The union said its workers will walk out because of insufficient staffing, poor management, and low pay, among other reasons, according to a statement.

Passenger arrivals surge during the summer, and Prague Airport expects about 3.5 million people to visit the medieval Czech capital this year during the high tourist season.

At the start of the month, a surge in flights resulted in hundreds of tourists reporting lost luggage in a situation that took several days to resolve, according to Prague Airport which apologized for the mess.

One airport security employee, who declined to give her name because of the sensitivity of the strike alert, said there weren’t enough baggage handlers to handle the influx. That had exacerbated what she said was an already difficult situation for those workers.

“Working conditions are now worse for these employees,” she said. “The suitcase situation was the last straw.”

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