The travel industry should have been better prepared for an increase in post-pandemic holidays, a government minister said, after scenes of chaos traveling to airports before the mid-term break.
Arts Minister Stephen Parkinson, a former adviser to Theresa May, said the disruption was causing “much distress” to people who had been unable to flee for several years due to the pandemic.
Flight cancellations have caused many passengers to face long delays in their mid-term breaks. EasyJet has canceled more than 200 flights to and from Gatwick between May 28 and June 6. The airline’s Twitter channel has been referring to dozens of stranded Gatwick passengers on its disruption assistance website.
Tui also made several last-minute cancellations, including in Gatwick, Birmingham and Bristol, blaming “operational and supply chain problems”.
Airports are under special pressure due to widespread use of previously canceled holiday travel vouchers, and this week will be the first school holiday in England and Wales since all travel restrictions were lifted. of Covid in the United Kingdom.
Airline Management Group CEO Peter Davies said the industry is likely to be reluctant to spend money to deal with the bottlenecks that passengers face.
“When you have thousands of people arriving at Heathrow at seven in the morning, and this has been going on for years, where there are a lot of people arriving on night flights, you should be prepared to do so. Surely you can handle these people. “, he said.
“But of course that costs money and it costs space, and people are often reluctant to do that.”
Lord Parkinson said airlines and airports had been urged by the government to hire more staff to meet demand. “Colleagues from the Department of Transportation have been working with the industry for months, asking them to make sure they have enough staff so that, thanks to the successful deployment of the vaccine, as people can travel again, the people can travel again. Take a vacation that has been missed and deserved, “he told Sky News.
“It simply came to our notice then.
“It’s very distressing if you show up at the airport and your flight isn’t ready, so we’ve been telling the industry to be prepared for that: they need to have the staff to make sure people can escape and enjoy the holidays. “
Parkinson said it was clear that better recruitment should have been done to meet rising demand. “There was a time when people just couldn’t travel for obvious reasons, but there were a lot of months when we got back on track, especially since vaccination … companies should have had people in its place “.
Shadow Treasury Secretary James Murray said it was not the case that the government had been giving adequate support to the sector.
“We’ve been warning for months during the Covid pandemic that you can’t let the airline industry and airports fall, let them go to all their staff, and then wait to get back on track when demand returns after the pandemic. “He said.
“We were warning about this, the unions were warning about this, employee representatives said during the Covid pandemic: ‘You need a sector-specific package to support the aviation sector’, and now we are seeing what has happened. past because the government has not I am not prepared for what would obviously come next, “Murray said.
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Tui issued a statement saying the increase in demand had led to the cancellations. He said: “We would like to apologize to some of our customers who have suffered flight delays in recent days.
“While flight delays and cancellations with us are rare, unfortunately the sudden increase in people going on holiday combined with various operational and supply chain problems has resulted in a small number of our flights. has been affected “.