Travel firms should have been ready for post-Covid surge, UK minister says

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The travel industry should have been better prepared for a surge in post-pandemic holidays, a government minister has said, after scenes of travel chaos in airports ahead of the half-term break.

The arts minister, Stephen Parkinson, a former adviser to Theresa May, said that disruption was causing “a lot of distress” for people who had not been able to get away for several years because of the pandemic.

Flight cancellations have led many passengers facing long delays to their half-term breaks, including easyJet, which has cancelled more than 200 flights to and from Gatwick between 28 May and 6 June. EasyJet’s Twitter feed has been referring dozens of stranded Gatwick passengers to its disruption help hub webpage.

Tui also made several last-minute cancellations including from Gatwick, Birmingham and Bristol, blaming “operational and supply chain issues”.

Airports are under particular pressure because of the widespread use of travel vouchers from previously cancelled holiday, and this week will be the first school holidays in England and Wales since the lifting of all UK Covid travel restrictions.

The chief executive of the Airline Management Group, Peter Davies, said the industry was likely to be reluctant to spend money to tackle the bottlenecks faced by passengers.

“When you’ve got thousands of people arriving at Heathrow at seven o’clock in the morning, and that’s been happening for years, where you got a lot of people arriving on overnight flights, then you should gear yourself up to make sure you can handle those people,” he said.

“But of course that costs money and it costs space, and people are reluctant often to do that.”

Lord Parkinson said that airlines and airports had been urged by the government to hire more staff to cope with demand. “Colleagues in the Department for Transport are working with the industry, we have been for months urging them to make sure they’ve got enough staff so that thanks to the success of the vaccine rollout, as people are able to travel again, that people can take the holidays that they’ve missed and that they’ve deserved,” he told Sky News. “Of course it’s causing a lot of distress for people particularly in half-term, people with family and children with them.

“It’s very distressing if you turn up at the airport and your flight isn’t ready, so we’ve been saying to the industry that they need to prepare for this, they need to have the staff that they need to make sure people can get away and enjoy holidays.”

Parkinson said it was clear better recruitment should have been done to cope with the increased demand. “There was a period when people just simply weren’t able to travel for obvious reasons, but there’s been many months where we’ve been back on track, particularly since the vaccination … the companies should have had the people in place.”

Labour shadow Treasury ministers, James Murray, said it was not the case that the government had been giving the right support to the sector.

“We’ve been warning for months throughout the Covid pandemic that you can’t just let the airline industry and airports fall over, let them shed all of their staff, and then expect to get back on track when demand comes back after the pandemic,” he said.

“We were warning about this, trade unions were warning about this, employee representatives were saying throughout the Covid pandemic, ‘You need a sector-specific package to support the aviation sector’, and now we’re seeing what’s happened because the government hasn’t prepared for what would obviously come next,” Murray said.

Tui issued a statement saying the increase in demand had caused the cancellations. It said: “We would like to apologise to some of our customers who have experienced flight delays in recent days.

“While flight delays and cancellations with us are rare, unfortunately, the sudden increase in people going on holidays combined with various operational and supply chain issues, has meant that a small number of our flights have been impacted.”