MOVEMENT AT MADEIRA AIRPORT WITH LONG LINES AT THE ‘CHECK IN’ (WITH VIDEO)

Tobi Hughes·
Madeira News

Saturday was a day of considerable movement at Madeira Airport, with nearly fifty flights being carried out, divided between departures and arrivals.

Yesterday, a busy day with special emphasis in the morning, in which seven aircraft landed in the space of an hour, some of them having waited in the air before landing, the scenario in the departures was also one of great concern. 

As shown in a video, the queues at check in on Transavia flights were formed by hundreds of people who, according to a reader, were prevented from checking in online/mobile, which left passengers “in a kind of Covid-19 bubble” without any distancing.

For today, as JM reports in this Sunday’s print edition, Madeira has 42 flights planned, 28 of which take place within the national territory. Lisbon will connect to Funchal through 18 flights (nine to each side), while Porto and Porto Santo will maintain their four daily flights and the Azores two.

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Tobi Hughes

8 Responses

  1. Will ever Madeira need a new airport. I can’t travel with this many people to be honest I would be already panicking if I was there…

  2. I’ll be honest, I love Madeira, but whoever runs the airport needs to review the organisation to keep people moving. We waited over one and a half hours to check in last week and the process could have been so easily stream lined. Plus had to queue for ages on entry to Madeira as the automatic passport readers not being used. I know Brits passports now have to be stamped but there were plenty of Madeiran/And other EU people in the queue who didn’t need to have to wait that long.

  3. This is such a turn-off for travel. Nobody likes to wait in long, slow-moving lines, crowded together- especially during a pandemic. Why don’t those in charge evaluate this situation and see how things can be more streamlined?

  4. I flew out of Madeira on Saturday 12th June with British Airways and only one couple in front of me, there were certainly long lines of people in the other lanes, I turned up 1.5 hours before flight, couldn’t check-in online as BA had to check Covid test and UK locator documents. I will only fly BA, travel to Madeira regularly pre-pandemic but so far impressed. If you are on a package holiday the people are bussed to airport together so that accounts for the long lines as they arrive and queue together. Madeira is one of the safest places to visit in the world, they locked down quickly and contain new cases in quarantine when found by testing. Certainly don’t be put off by the long lines, everyone in that queue would have had to take a negative test to board the plane. On the flight back I had the whole row to myself and the rest of the row on the other side was empty, I guess some passengers had gone back to the UK before the deadline, I travelled out on Green and now Madeira in the Amber category sadly as they are part of Portugal, hopefully this will all change when Portugal mainland numbers reduce.

  5. The way our numbers are growing it’s possible we may not be welcomed.

  6. THE MORE I READ ABOUT THIS SORT OF THING THE MORE I AM GLAD I HAVE REMAINED IN THE UK. IT HAPPENS EVERYWHERE, NO CO-ORDINATION BETWEEN VARIOUS OPERTAIONS/DEPATMENTS LEADNG TO DELAYS AND FRUSTRATION. MADEIRA ARE CERTAINY NOT ON THEIR OWN IN COPYING SPAIN. IF THEY WISH TO TREAT THEIR PASSENGERS LIKE CATTLE, THEN THAT`S OK WITH ME BUT COUNT ME OUT. I SUPPOSE HAVING VISITED THE ISLAND UPWARDS OF 40 TIMES NUFFS ENUFF.

  7. My partner and I were travelling from Funchal to Manchester on August 2nd. We joined the queue at 5.10, an hour before the check in opened and waited over an hour in hot sticky conditions for the desk to open. Once open progress was really slow. The check in operator needed to confirm and cross reference the UK Locator Form, the Madeira negative test form with the boarding pass and the passport. In many cases passengers offered these documents by showing ipads or smart phones. We supplied hard paper copies and we were able to check in quickly and easily.Meanwhile large queue had formed and with slow progress by the two Groundforce check in staff. Two Groundforce members checking in passengers on a virtually full passenger jet along with the added on chore of scrutinising each and every document was always going to be a recipe for disaster. How the plane ws only delayed for 1/2 hour is beyond me.

    1. Totally agree the check-in has become ridiculous for UK flights, and something needs to be done about this, especially for all those that have everything printed, they should have a separate line, but I’m sure nearly all UK flights are not leaving on time.

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