Travel firms have oversold flights and holidays – UK Transport Secretary

By Michael Race & Beth Timmins, Business reporters, BBC News

Airlines and operators have “seriously oversold flights and holidays” relative to their capacity to deliver, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps has said.

Mr Shapps said it had been “very distressing” to see people facing more disruption at airports with “holidays cancelled and plans left in disarray”.

Passengers are facing travel problems ahead of the Jubilee weekend, with several airlines cancelling flights.

Up to two million people are preparing to fly over the next few days.

The vast majority of flights will be operating as scheduled, said Airlines UK which represents Tui, EasyJet and British Airways.

Mr Shapps said the government had been clear that it was up to industry leaders to tackle travel disruption, which was also seen at Easter.

“Despite government warnings, operators seriously oversold flights and holidays relative to their capacity to deliver. This must not happen again and all efforts should be directed at there being no repeat of this over the summer – the first post-Covid summer season,” he added.

Passengers are facing ongoing disruption ahead of the bank holiday weekend, with holiday giant Tui announcing it will cancel six flights a day until the end of June, affecting around 34,000 travellers in all.

Around 10,000 flights are set to leave the UK between Thursday and Sunday, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium.

Other airlines, including EasyJet, have also cancelled flights, with the aviation industry suffering from staff shortages as it struggles to recruit replacements for the thousands of workers it laid off during the coronavirus pandemic when international travel halted.

Before Covid, airports and airlines across Britain employed around 140,000 people, but since then thousands of jobs have been cut, including around 30,000 for UK airlines alone.

Paul Charles, chief executive of travel consultancy The PC Agency and a former Virgin Atlantic director, said the industry had been “overwhelmed” since demand for flights returned after the pandemic but argued the government itself was “responsible for this chaos”.

“[The transport secretary] has got a bit of a nerve I’m afraid,” he told the BBC. “It’s because of government restrictions that changed so much during the pandemic, and then the shutdown of the industry with the Omicron variant last December, that has created this problem.”

He added that without certainty over when travel restrictions would be eased, the industry was not able to recruit more staff.

Kelly Sandhu, from the Aviation Recruitment Network, said the process of hiring new workers took a long time so there was “not a quick fix” .

Airlines UK said the sector had “only a matter of weeks to recover and prepare for one of the busiest summers we’ve seen in many years” but, despite this, “the vast majority” of flights this week would be operating as scheduled.

Michael Turner, a nurse from Shoreham, is currently on his third attempt to go on holiday with his family to Tenerife.

He rebooked a Tui flight which was all that was available and said he experienced “absolute chaos” in the departure lounge at Manchester Airport.

After boarding the plane, Mr Turner said they spent three hours waiting only to be then escorted off to collect their baggage.

They were put on a coach without being told where they were going and then waited to be taken back to the airport for a flight on Tuesday evening.

Manchester Airport said Tui and Swissport, which provides ground services such as baggage handling, were “experiencing temporary staff shortages, in common with other aviation and travel companies”.

A spokesperson for Swissport apologised for its part in any disruption, adding that the return of demand for flights was “exacerbating resource challenges across the aviation industry”.

Elsewhere, Glasgow Airport said the airport had been “busier than it has been for more than two years”, while at Edinburgh Airport some passengers had to queue outside the terminal building to check in luggage.

Prospect, the union which represents staff across air traffic control and in aviation engineering, warned that things could “get worse before they get better”.

Garry Graham, its deputy general secretary, said that while the furlough scheme had helped people, the government had ignored that it “ended well before the majority of international restrictions on travel came to an end”.

But Mr Shapps said the government had helped the industry through “changing the law to speed up bringing in newly recruited staff” as well as providing £8bn of support during the pandemic.

The Airport Operators Association, which represents the industry, said big recruitment campaigns had been under way since before the start of this year and additional staff were now being deployed.

Source: bbc.com