Easyjet Innsbruck Delays and "High Risk Booking"



The last 5 easyjet flights I've been on from Innsbruck have been
delayed.  The easyjet flight out from Innsbruck is always the plane that's
just arrived.  The airport doesn't have much traffic, so are
probably flexible on slots.  So I suspect easyjet are playing a
game, perhaps involving saving a marginal amount of airport
fees on each flight, by scheduling for unrealistic turnarounds,
and systematically messing their customers around, on every flight out of
Innsbruck, in the process.
 
The departure boards might not work at Guernsey, but at least the
flight left on time.
 
And at checkin, the checkin person called over a colleague and asked
them how to handle a "high risk booking".  These three words were
in English, the rest in German.  This might explain the increasingly
idiotic questionning every time I check in to fly out of Innsbruck, things along the
lines of "going home are you" (kind of, well, no -- I was resident in
Austria atthe time).  On the previous occasion, the question did not seem natural, and I asked about it, and she said it was to do with immigration.  I assumed
Austrian, but she then said the airline gets a big fine from the UK if
they carry in an illegal immigrant.  The case being guarded against
seemed to be someone other than me travelling on my passport, or a
copy of my passport.  I'm not sure if the passport holder tends to
be in on this.  I'm reminded of Viz's "Elton John's Milk Bilk", in
which Elton John operates a petty crime scam involving households'
doorstep milk payments.  Back to today, I asked what was high risk
and who flagged it.  "Don't worry it's just regulatory".  Well, it's
starting to get annoying, even if it's just the application of a
statistical rule.  Especially if it is.  And he said it's the
British government, I guess home office or border agency or whatever.
 
A few months ago, I was getting selected every time for extra searches
and questions at security / customs / immigration.  I asked a couple
of times if it was targeted or random, and what the probability
was.  They did say completely random each time, probability around 5%.
One time was a boat between Guernsey and Southampton, both in the CTA, FFS.

update: at LGW North, after the passport machines failed as usual, I asked the immigration officer what was with this "high risk booking" thing.  He said it's because there are a lot of people called Tom Jones that they would want to stop.  I asked if that meant anyone with a high-frequency name is likely to have the same issue.  Yes, he said.  But a system is due to be rolled out, in 4 years, which may alleviate this issue.  He said it would be worse if your middle name were also common (my middle name is "Gwyn").  Thus we see that this system, whatever it is, is designed and operated by people with no understanding of probability.


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