Easyjet has cancelled hundreds of preemptive flights up to June 6 due to their IT problems and traffic control restrictions at Gatwick. They are planning on-the-day cancellations too. Destinations affected include Seville, Rome, Barcelona, Bilbao, Geneva, Glasgow, Krakow, Lisbon, Madrid, Milan Bergamo, Milan Malpensa, Olbia, Palermo, Prague, Valencia and Venice.
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British Airways is continuing with its planned cancellations to domestic and international services, with more than 100 flights a day removed from the schedule.
Last night Tui, Britain’s biggest holiday company, announced that it has cancelled nearly 400 flights between Manchester airport and a range of holiday destinations between now and the end of June with immediate effect including from Manchester to Fuerteventura in Spain’s Canary Islands.
There have been reports of early-morning queues at Bristol Airport, as well as Glasgow and Stansted. The UK’s airports have struggled to “scale up” to meet the post-Covid / spring surge in holidaymakers. Staff shortages or troubles with recruitment have been cited as the reasons for the disruptions.
This morning the arts minister Lord Parkinson expressed his annoyance at the travel industry, saying:
‘We’ve been saying to the industry you need to prepare for this, they need to have the staff we need to make sure people can get away and enjoy holidays’
Indeed, during the last few months travel restrictions have been diminishing, and demand for travel has been increasing yet BA, Easyjet and Tui, the UK’s largest holiday companies, have been utterly unprepared for what is a seasonal upsurge that is always predictable.
