Better times ahead for Schiphol Airport?

I'm looking at a trip to Utrecht in late August, and direct flights from Vancouver to Amsterdam, return, have always been a no-brainer. How long is this going to go on?

I flew in and out of Frankfurt in May with no problems and now I'm wondering if I should fly to Germany in August and take the train instead. I know these hours long lines are happening all over (Toronto, Dublin come to mind).

I guess I'm wondering if this is a temporary problem or the new reality of travel. Does anyone have any ideas?

Schipol is not the only airport with issues. Dublin over the weekend.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61624910

By August the issues at Schipol will likely be resolved. The strike by some airport workers was resolved earlier this week which means they will be returning to work. Employees sidelined by Covid should not be an issue two to three months from now in late August.

How long is this going to go on?

Nobody knows, but the strike being resolved is a positive sign that things could start to improve soon.

Here's an update from today:

The crowds will continue through the rest of June, at least on the weekend. Once the summer holidays hit, the situation will worsen, according to the APOC update. Staff shortages will cause endless lines in July. In August, the situation will improve somewhat. But APOC stressed that these are only expectations, which can change either way.

https://nltimes.nl/2022/06/01/another-busy-weekend-ahead-schiphol-summer-will-worse

Oi
Still deciding if I want to go way out our way to fly in and out elsewhere or risk it for September. I'm in the prime buying window for tickets on budget airlines right now... waiting and the price will go up, but that doesn't matter if the flight will be canceled anyhow!

Update: To prevent crowds from getting out of hand, Schiphol only allows people to enter the departure halls if their flight departs within four hours. Employees are therefore asking travelers for their flight time before they can go into the departure hall.

https://nltimes.nl/2022/06/03/schiphol-crowded-ahead-pentecost-weekend-departure-hall-access-limitation-enforced

KLM cancels all flights from European cities to Schiphol on Saturday night https://nltimes.nl/2022/06/04/klm-cancels-flights-european-cities-schiphol-saturday-night

My flight from Bergen Norway to AMS was canceled the day before my flight. We took a taxi to the airport to rebook our flight (I’m traveling with an elderly friend who gets confused and could not do the flight KLM had put her on). The KLM agent rebooked both of us for Monday June 6 at 6 am. (I had to cancel my rebooked ticket.)

No email confirmation this morning so back to the airport and the KLM agent gave us boarding passes only to AMS, we will get boarding passes for our destination in AMS. We retested this afternoon and negative again! So we go home tomorrow! Yay.

Our experience shows throw money at a problem and it clears up. Hence 4 taxi rides.

Holy moly. I am following lots of stats on the best time to buy tickets and I'm going to be past the window soon. At this point, I think I'm going to have to avoid Amsterdam. Doesn't seem worth the risk even if it is in September.

I live in Pittsburgh and, in my experience, infrastructure problems don't get fixed in 6 months let alone 3. (Case in point: President Biden traveled to Pittsburgh to discuss infrastructure issues and the morning he arrived, the bridge we crossed multiple times a day for work and school collapsed completely.)

From what I understand it's staffing, or lack thereof.

I'm sorry, I put that badly! I was considering the staffing and organizational issues to be infrastructure issues since the airport itself is not functional as a result. And in my experience, those things don't get ironed out in weeks... crossing my fingers that's not the case at Schiphol.

Ugh, we fly in and out and in again in July. Hope these issues are resolved!

Here's the latest https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2022/06/gridlock-at-schiphol-set-to-continue-as-airlines-say-no-to-scrapping-flights/

I’m back home and can report that Schiphol is still a mess. Now that they have limited access to the Arrivals Hall unless you have a flight in the next two hours, the Arrivals Hall is crowded but not chaotic. However the lines for Passport Control are very long and we had one hour to make our flight. I insisted they put us in a shorter line as my elderly friend can’t stand for a very long time. We did get on our plane but we sat in it for 3-1/2 hours while the Operations people fixed some problematic systems on the plane before we were cleared for takeoff. We arrived home 3 hours late, safe but really late.
I asked the Passport agent what was going on and he said a lack of personnel. Covid is still going on and workers are sick and workers were fired at the beginning of the Pandemic and workers didn’t come back. Hence a mess which is made worse by greater numbers of travelers. Pent up demand!