16 April 10, 2022The Sunday TimesTravel Analysis
L
ast Tuesday a family from
Skelmersdale — Michelle and
Robert Donohue and their
12-year-old son — arrived at
Manchester airport at 3am to
catch Ryanair’s 7.15am flight to Rome.
After queueing for an hour at the bag drop
they joined a security line so long and
slow that it was, said Michelle, 6am before
she caught sight of the belts. By 6.55am
the family were “about ten people away
from the trays”, and after a panicked dash
they reached the gate at 7:10am to find
the flight had closed, leaving them and
about 20 other late arrivals stranded.
Hope surged when their flight returned
to the gate to offload passengers after an
onboard medical emergency, but as
Ryanair explained, “passengers cannot
be accepted on board once a flight has
closed — even in the unusual event of
an aircraft returning to stand”.
The flight operated as scheduled,
so the family have been left £1,500
out of pocket. They were
escorted to the baggage hall
to collect their luggage,
only to find it had
been lost. Welcome
to the Great British
Easter Getaway.WHAT’S
GOING ON?
The 2022 school
Easter holidays should
be a landmark moment in
travel. With the world largely
reopened, families are able to go
abroad without restrictions for the
first time since the summer holidays
of 2019. It’s a vindication of faith and
an opportunity that, even in the darkest
hours of the pandemic, we knew would
eventually return. But airlines and
airports appear not to have seen this
coming, or worse, foresaw the
explosion of pent-up demand for
travel, calculated the costs of
servicing it and chose not to.
Either way, the consequence
has been a week of cancelled
flights, hour-long check-in queues,
three-hour waits to clear security,
lost or undelivered baggage,
information blackouts,
at least one high-level resignation
and, astonishingly, the prospect
of the police being brought in to
keep order. Our big airports are
teetering on the point of collapse,
and analysts warn that it’s going to
get much worse.WHAT IS CAUSING THE CHAOS?
Officially, this fiasco is the
consequence of staff shortages during
peak demand caused by a recruiting
crisis and a sudden increase in
Covid-related absence. The truth,
though, is that airlines and airports
have laid off thousands over the
past two years to save costs —
and this is not the first timeLost luggage,
long queues and
cancelled flights —
why our airlines and
airports are
in crisis. By
Chris Haslam
they’ve used Covid as an excuse. In
June 2020 MPs declared British Airways
a “national disgrace” after the carrier
announced plans to cut 13,000 jobs —
or one in four — and force remaining
employees to reapply under new,
harsher contracts. It was, said the
Commons transport select committee,
“a calculated plan to take advantage of
the pandemic”. EasyJet reduced its
workforce by 30 per cent, or about
4,500 jobs across Europe, and in July
John Holland-Kaye, the Heathrow chief
executive, announced that a staggering
50,000 passes had been handed back by
staff who had lost their jobs at the airport.
In October Holland-Kaye was accused
by the MP John McDonnell of “exploiting
the pandemic crisis to impose cuts in
wages and terms of employment for
workers” after announcing permanent
pay cuts of 25 per cent.WHAT THE H
IS GOING ON?
FLIGHT
CHAOS
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