Travellers planning their Christmas holidays will need to brace themselves for possible delays, confusion and lost baggage over the busy festive season because the company that has taken over Air Malta’s ground handling operations is having difficulty coping.

Several Air Malta customers have taken to social media to complain about the difficulties they have faced over the past two weeks. Some have had their luggage lost, while others have missed their connecting flights because of mistakes being made by the newly imported ground handling staff.

The Shift is informed that while Air Malta’s full-time ground handling staff were either transferred to other government departments or given generous golden handshakes as incentives to leave the company, the new operation that has replaced them – Aviation Services Handling Ltd – is severely short of staff.

The new employees, almost all of whom are foreign nationals, are not adequately trained and are far from up to the job.

One of the problems is that hardly any of the new recruits, primarily Italian, understand a word of English, let alone Maltese, and appear to be out of their depth when it comes to the standard airline operating procedures.

One 29-year-old regular Air Malta passenger told The Shift, “After waiting ages to check in my luggage, I had to point out to the individual handling my reservation that she needed to stick the identification barcode to my luggage before sending it to the conveyor belt. This is just basic, and thank God I noticed the mistake.”

Another woman who was travelling to the US to visit her parents for the holidays recounted how Air Malta ground handlers refused to connect her and her luggage with her next flight – a standard practice in aviation – since, they said, they did not yet know how to use the IT system.

“This is outrageous,” she said, explaining how she had to pick up her luggage mid-way through her trip, was made to check in again at the connecting airport and almost missed her next flight.

Others said their luggage was nowhere to be seen when they arrived at their destination, and they only received it at their hotel three days later.

Senior sources at Air Malta confirmed the new company is “still green” and “no real training has been given to the new staff” assigned to cut costs for the airline. But, they said, this is to be expected when experienced people are fired and a new company without trained employees is brought in to cut costs.

Finance Minister Clyde Caruana, who is managing the national airline’s latest restructuring exercise after the 2012 exercise veered far from its original objectives, has not commented on the mayhem.

Caruana is said to be directing company chairman David Curmi to shed as many Air Malta workers as possible and to start employing workers on lower remunerations.

At the same time, Air Malta continues to advertise vacancies for new staff without giving details about the poor conditions offered.

Registered just a few weeks ago, Aviation Services Handling Ltd is a new joint venture between Air Malta (40%) and Rome-based Aviation Services Spa (60%), which took over the ground services for all Air Malta flights and those of the few other airlines left using Air Malta for its ground handling  – namely Turkish Airlines and Alitalia’s successor ITA.

In the meantime, the government is still seeking a green light from the European Commission for it to be able to inject some €250 million in state funding into the airline to save it from complete failure.

The Shift has already revealed the government’s plans to wind down Air Malta and to start a new airline from scratch, with the government intending to blame the eventuality on Brussels having not approved its latest State Aid request.