Stranded Passengers: Vow To Make Contingency Plan

A contingency plan will be devised for passengers who arrive outside of the airport's opening times - after up to 20 people were left stranded.

The visitors to the island were left with no way of getting to their accommodation on Sunday night (21 August) after arriving after 10pm on two delayed flights.

No buses were running by then, and not enough taxis were available.

Islander Simone Roberts saw it first-hand and criticised the lack of preparedness.

There were young children crying, elderly cold, visitors with no idea where to go or who to call left outside late on a Sunday evening in disbelief. This is not an issue placed on taxis. Their bookings were full until gone 12am and could not move things to allow for plane delays

— Eva Simone (@Eva_Simone_) August 22, 2022

In response, Tourism Lead Deputy Neil Inder told Island FM it was ‘shoddy’ and said that Environment & Infrastructure and the States’ Trading Supervisory Board need to come up with a plan for when there are late-night arriving flights. 

Guernsey Ports and Environment and Infrastructure have now released a joint statement acknowledging what happened 'reflects poorly on Guernsey the moment people arrive.'

" It is not acceptable for passengers to be left stranded in this way and reflects poorly on Guernsey the moment people arrive.

We will work with the airlines, the ports and the on-island public transport providers to develop a contingency plan for these unpredictable events, so that this can be implemented at short notice."

E&I Committee President Deputy Lindsay de Sausmarez has told Island FM;

"This is not the first impression that we want to give any visitors to the island, so it's a really unfortunate occurrence and I hope it doesn't happen again.

This is not the responsibility of any single committee, it really requires a joint response.

So we need to work with the committee with responsibility for tourism, which is Economic Development. We need to work with the Ports and we with responsibility for transport like taxis and bus services, also need to be involved.

We need to put in place a short-term contingency plan to make sure that if the situation arises again, we can deal with it far better and more appropriately."

In addition, E&I is due to publish the findings of a review of the taxi industry. Deputy De Sausmarez says that work is 'nearing completion'.

"The taxi industry has been hit particularly hard by the pandemic, and we know that we need to probably make some fairly fundamental changes in order to put it on a firmer fitting."