Travel chaos as customers face huge queues at Heathrow Airport

Customers have complained of travel chaos following huge queues at Heathrow Airport.

Travellers at the airport experienced hours of queuing for passport control on Monday morning amid the industry’s ongoing staffing crisis.

The situation – due to delays at security – was described as “absolute chaos” and “manic” by passengers.

One traveller said he had “never seen it this bad”, with images showing hundreds of people huddled in Terminal 3.

Sean O’Brien, 53, complained about the “mammoth” queues following his arrival at the west London airport at 8.45am on Monday after a trip to Bologna.

“I’ve never seen it this bad. I had to queue for 30 minutes just to get into the passport hall itself and around an hour of queuing in total. It was packed. A lot of the digital passport readers were open and the queue did eventually start moving – I think the problem is that a lot of flights landed together and everyone was stuck in the same queue.

“It was chaotic. I’ve been coming into Heathrow for the past 20 to 30 years and I’ve never seen it like that.

“A lot of passengers were griping about it.”

The aviation sector has blamed staff shortages for long queues reported at airports in recent weeks, including at Heathrow and Stansted.

British Airways and easyJet have axed hundreds of flights in recent months due to ongoing staff shortages.

A Heathrow spokesperson said: “Earlier this morning for a short period of time Border Force experienced a large influx of passengers arriving into Terminal 3’s immigration hall. We worked closely with Border Force to minimise the queue times and the operation continued to run normally.”