A leading travel agency boss is calling for a public inquiry into the power failure at Manchester airport at the weekend, which saw agents across the North West scramble to help their clients and attempt to save their holidays on Sunday (23 June).
The incident led Travel Village Group chief executive Phil Nuttall, along with several other agencies, to question the airport’s contingency planning.
Manchester airport chief executive Chris Woodroofe has confirmed a full investigation into the incident, which led to dozens of flights being cancelled, would take place.
Woodroofe said he believed the fault had been traced to an underground cable following a "big power spike".
In a video message posted to X (formerly Twitter), Woodroofe said he wished to offer affected passengers his “sincere, personal apologies”. Flights were due to operate as scheduled on Monday (24 June), along with services rescheduled from Sunday.
The airport and its major airlines have promised to reunite passengers who ended up travelling without their baggage with their belongings as soon as possible with the outage affecting baggage and security systems at terminals 1 and 2.
Nuttall described the situation as “horrendous”, and praised the efforts of tour operators and cruise lines as well as Travel Village’s own emergency response team.
“Why were we in this position?" asked Nuttall. "I don’t understand what the contingency plans were. There should be a public inquiry into this. Who is taking responsibility? It is absolutely shocking.
“I’m being deadly serious here. We do not know what is going on. These aircraft were flying without luggage.”
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