What went wrong at Heathrow? The airport that confidently unveiled expansion plans and charged customers a hefty premium has repeatedly suffered the kind of chaos people pay money to avoid: flight cancellations, long lines, mountains of luggage lost and strike threats. Now, at the start of the summer peak, he has told airlines to turn passengers away.
In a week in which baking temperatures swept across Britain, few places felt the heat more. Heathrow’s own posters highlighting the ‘elephant in the room’ – aviation’s contribution to climate change – have never seemed more appropriate as the mercury hit a record 40.2C in l ‘airport, the grass between its runways dried up to a desert brown.
Last week, Heathrow announced a daily limit of 100,000 passengers until September 11, angering airlines and jeopardizing the plans of thousands of customers. The airport insisted it was “protecting the holiday”, but the response was fierce. Emirates initially flatly refused to honor or cancel the flights. In some of the milder invective, Willie Walsh, the chief executive of Iata, and an old enemy of the management of British Airways and its parent group, IAG, has described Heathrow as “a bunch of idiots when it comes to manage airports”.
Eager storm clouds of passengers
Inside the airport terminals this week, the line between busy and frantic was fine. At least the air conditioning was working though. On a quiet morning in Terminal 5, it didn’t look like chaos. “Give it a couple of hours,” said a BA staff member on the tail ropes, smiling, with a gentle nod. “It just comes and goes… Just random.”
The turmoil in the airline industry is self-perpetuating: huge queues grow and anxious passengers show up earlier and earlier for flights. Wider travel disruption doesn’t help: Set up with a laptop and luggage at Pret, one seasoned traveler said he had arrived nine hours before his flight to Australia, after being warned the heat could stop the trains I needed to the airport.
Adjacent Terminal 2 is Heathrow’s most modern addition, opened in 2014 with the optimistic goal of getting passengers through there from the plane in minutes, without the traditional check-in lanes. Now, however, a man in a suit was patiently explaining over and over to customers that despite checking in online, they still had to enter the daunting United Airlines line to comply with US security procedures.
All around, various staff members in airline livery, high-visibility vests or the pink polo shirts of “Heathrow helpers” – are marshaling incoming groups that appear and disperse like storm clouds.
Post-Covid restrictions, with corporate travel curtailed, fewer and fewer passengers are likely to be mobile, hassle-free and tech-savvy frequent flyers. Many here do not speak English, with large amounts of baggage; old, young, sick, they are faced with confusing designs, requests for QR codes and additional documentation about Covid, and they need help of all kinds.
And if the terminals can seem chaotic, the worst problems have been on the air side. Today’s delays are relatively minor, but the arrivals board now has an additional feature along with a flight’s landing time: whether bags have been delivered or are arriving. Although the BA flight from Kuwait landed more than 90 minutes ago, the bags still haven’t hit the carousels.
So reducing the number of passengers by just a few thousand can make a big difference to those traveling, Heathrow chief executive John Holland-Kaye said defiantly in Terminal 5 on Tuesday, after mounting speculation about his future. “We are taking action with the cap to protect people’s holidays. We have 100,000 passengers traveling today, it is the hottest day we have ever had and the airport is running smoothly. This shows that the action we are taking, in circumstances difficult, it’s working.”
Pointing the finger
Holland-Kaye said no one wanted a “blame game” but said the overriding factor was a lack of airline groundhandling staff, whether contracted – from companies such as Menzies, Swissport or Cobalt – or contracted directly. The main effect of the cap will be to limit further ticket sales, but around 1,500 passengers on the busiest summer days will be forced to change their plans, on top of the hundreds of thousands already affected by mass cancellations of BA ordered at the beginning of summer.
“The reality is that if the airport, airlines or ground handlers don’t have enough capacity, people won’t get off their flights much worse: their flights are canceled after they’ve checked in, maybe even the plane,” Holland-Kaye said. “This is the worst of all worlds.”
The labor shortage has been exacerbated by lengthy background checks for new hires and competition from other industries.
Surprisingly, few things come under the direct competition of the airport, except security officers and infrastructure provision. Airlines do billing. The immigration hall, scene of the queues of holders in previous years, is the responsibility of the Ministry of the Interior and its employees of the Border Force. While the automated baggage systems (usually) are kept running at Heathrow, the handlers who put bags in or take them out are employed, or contracted, by the airlines.
Even the people on the tarmac, driving baggage trucks, hooking up flybridges or backing planes out of the stand, are direct or outsourced airline personnel.
“Excess” shareholder return
Airlines, however, point to multiple failings at Heathrow: a lack of security staff that saw long queues at Easter; the unreliable baggage system; and a lack of pre-cap planning, brought in at the 11th hour. As Holland-Kaye himself said, there are 400 separate companies working at the airport, and his role is to “keep them working on tandem”.
While airlines such as BA have agreed and cut more and more flights from their schedules to keep the plates spinning, the latest showdown has come against a backdrop of a bitter dispute over landing charges . Heathrow had proposed doubling the price, set by the UK regulator, that airlines can charge per passenger.
That sparked a furious backlash from operators who have suffered huge losses and are questioning whether Heathrow’s shareholders, largely Qatar and other sovereign wealth funds, should go deeper, after receiving £4bn in dividends in the last decade
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Heathrow’s ever-increasing debt, up to £15.4 billion at last count, has funded an investment that directly increases returns the more it is built, under the regulatory system. Airlines see it as enjoying an enviably stable position, or as Virgin Atlantic CEO Shai Weiss put it: “Abusing its monopoly position to make passengers jealous and deliver excessive returns to shareholders.”
At the Farnborough Air Show this week, Walsh said Heathrow was not ready for the strength of the recovery because of his own pessimistic forecast, which he claimed was “playing games” with the regulator to allow him to raise rates of landing Although airlines had detected a recovery in pent-up demand, Heathrow played it down. Holland-Kaye rejects the charge, saying airlines should have hired more managers sooner if they expected recovery.
It seems the blame game has a way of working, just like problems. Holland-Kaye says it will take 12 to 18 months to resolve the staffing issues. The limit may not be lifted for half term or Christmas, he hinted: “They have about 70% of staff trying to serve about 80-85% of passengers and that’s not working.”