The oft-quoted pent-up demand for international air travel was demonstrated in full force in the UK today when Easter break holidaymakers began to depart for sunnier climes. Unfortunately, the rise in COVID-19 cases in the UK has led to an increase in staff sicknesses, forcing airlines to cancel flights and airports to struggle with the influx of passengers with a reduced staff.
easyJet and British Airways have both cancelled flights due to high levels of Covid-19 infections among staff. easyJet has cancelled 222 flights since Friday but even though it added standby crew over the weekend, further absences required more flight cancellations. Some 62 flights were cancelled today.
“As a result of the current high rates of Covid infections across Europe, like all businesses easyJet is experiencing higher than usual levels of employee sickness,” said an easyJet spokesperson. “We have made 62 pre-emptive cancellations for flights to and from the UK for [Monday] which represents a small proportion of [Monday’s] total flying programme which was planned to be more than 1,645 flights. We cancelled the majority of these [on Saturday].”
British Airways has cancelled 115 flights today – five of which were made at the last minute due to staff absence – the others were as a result of a reduction in its schedule to help improve reliability and suspend certain Asian routes due to the continuing impact of the pandemic. Travel journalist Simon Calder told the BBC this morning that BA had priced European flights at unaffordable levels over the next two weeks in an alleged attempt to discourage more bookings to allow the airline to focus on delivering on existing customers bookings.
In the UK, average daily COVID-19 cases hit 84,000 people in the week to 24 March, and statistics suggest that as many as one in every 13 people in the UK were infected by the virus. Hospitalisation rates remain low, however.
Manchester and London Heathrow airports were also reporting staff absences and delays through the airports over the weekend, which appear to be continuing today.
“As we continue to recover from the pandemic and passenger numbers grow, security queues may be longer than usual at times. If you're due to travel in the next few weeks, please arrive at the earliest time your airline allows. We apologise to our customers for the disruption,” said Manchester Airport in a statement.
Much has been said by airlines and industry media that airlines have used the pandemic to strengthen their flexibility, being able to ramp up capacity in line with demand. There’s not too much evidence of that in the UK today. Gone are the days where airlines could lease in charter aircraft to cope with increases in demand.
Airlines in the US also cancelled many flights this weekend but those were due to storms in Florida, a technology outage at Southwest, which also came at the worst time for holidaymakers during the Spring break travel season. Over the weekend, Southwest cancelled 520 flights on Saturday and 398 on Sunday. Spirit Airlines cancelled around 27% of its flights on Saturday and the following day, with JetBlue cancelling a similar amount. American Airlines scheduled flights were also impacted by the storms.
Alaska Airlines also cancelled flights and grounded planes but this was due to a labour dispute with its pilots. The contract dispute between the airline and the Air Lines Pilots Association will be heard before a federal mediator.