Breakdown at Orly: compensation requested from the ADP manager

An “inconceivable” incident. This is how Marc Rochet, director of the Air Caraïbes and French Bee companies described the breakdown at Orly this Thursday. There second in three days. Both airlines were affected by a long outage of a baggage handling system.

Of computer origin, this breakdown of the baggage conveyor in terminal 4 of the second French airport lasted more than 12 hours before being resolved at the start of the evening. In the middle of the summer peak period, it caused major delays in departing planes, and forced some flights to leave without checked baggage.

2,000 pieces of luggage “remained outstanding”

Some 2,000 bags remained outstanding just for the companies Air Caraïbes and French Bee (Dubreuil Group), indicated on the antenna of RMC the boss of these companies, Marc Rochet. The priority for the companies is to redirect them to their owners, and this will be done “for most of them today”, this Friday, promised the business leader.

The regulations provide that if a passenger does not have his luggage delivered on arrival, he is entitled to claim from the airline the reimbursement on invoice of the “basic necessities” that he had to acquire, such as hygiene or underwear. Beyond 21 days of delay, the luggage is considered lost and its owner can request compensation, capped at approximately 1,600 euros.

Salt addition for ADP

Such a breakdown, which affected a total of 10,000 people on 40 flights according to ADP, “is absolutely inconceivable, and above all the development of emergency solutions has been in our eyes a little too slow”, lamented the leader. Air Caraibes and French Bee. The manager asks that the company Aéroports de Paris (ADP) take charge of the invoice.

“We will first send the luggage to our customers, then take their complaints, process them, compensate them, and indeed at the end of this count which will undoubtedly take a few weeks, we will present (…) the invoice to Aéroports de Paris”, Groupe ADP, stated Mr. Rochet.

“This major breakdown, which has handicapped our operations, our flights, which has upset the plan of our crews, our ground company operators, has financial consequences, and it is obvious that we do not intend to support them”, has he hammered.

“We could no doubt have managed the responsiveness of the system better”, by switching operations more quickly to the other Orly terminals, which were operating normally, noted Mr. Rochet.