LBC Views: Someone needs to be held accountable for 'earth-shattering' travel chaos
13 July 2022, 19:57 | Updated: 14 July 2022, 08:39
Picture it. You work a full-time job, you have children, you have bills to pay, and you haven’t been able to catch a break for more than two years because of Covid.
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You’ve booked a holiday with the family and it’s one of the only things keeping you going as you work hard, the cost of everything seems to have risen, and the kids are about to finish their exams or start a new school in September.
You’ve saved money, you’ve bought new clothes for the whole family, you’ve packed, you’ve planned, and most of all, you’re excited and happy.
Only for your flights to get cancelled the week, the day, even the morning before you’re due to travel.
That is exactly what has already happened to thousands of families across the country – and it’s set to happen to potentially hundreds of thousands more. Heathrow airport alone will cut passenger numbers by 4,000 a day over the Summer.
Yes, it’s an immense privilege to be able to go on holiday. Yes, there are worse things to happen. But this problem is not trivial. It’s earth-shattering, and someone needs to be held accountable.
I experienced just a taste of this for myself at Heathrow, on the first Saturday in July. I was travelling to Santorini in Greece for a close friend’s wedding. Like most people, it was my first holiday since Covid, and I was meeting friends who I hadn’t seen since the pandemic started. It had been booked almost a year in advance, and I’d worked hard to save money to go. I was so excited that I hadn’t shut up about for weeks. (They were sick of me in the LBC office!)
I’d decided to take hand luggage only – I’d seen the photos of bags piled up at airports, and I knew some passengers had been waiting around four hours for their luggage to be unloaded from the plane. On the morning of my flight, I had checked and double checked that it was still due to go ahead.
It wasn’t until I was sat in departures having gone through security, that I got an email from British Airways to say my flight had been cancelled. It was less than an hour and a half before take-off.
If my jaw could have hit the floor, it would. My heart sank, and I was in complete disbelief. I went to the customer service desk convinced it must be a mistake. I’d been fully composed until they asked "how can I help?" – and I burst in to tears.
I felt stupid for it, and I feel stupid for it now. It is probably the definition of a 'first world problem' and there are so many people in worse situations. But I think everybody knows that feeling of gut-wrenching disappointment when you’ve been looking forward to something so much, for so long, only for it to be taken away at the last moment with no explanation.
From an economical point of view, millions of hard working people are spending thousands of pounds on holidays now that travel is finally allowed again after Covid. When this happens, they’re entitled to a refund, plus compensation from the airline. How are airports and airlines expected to make back the losses they suffered during the pandemic at this rate?
In my case, a stressful and expensive trip to Birmingham Airport meant it all worked out okay in the end. But this should not be happening on this scale. As a fellow passenger I spoke to put it: "Where’s the planning? Where’s the forward thinking? I’m a project manager, I do this for a job – you plan for these things."
What’s more – travel in Britain as a whole appears to be bursting at the seams. One of my trains to Birmingham, from Euston in London, couldn’t depart because it was too full. Passengers had to be forced off before it was safe to leave. My connecting train at Rugby was cancelled. And after those nightmare rail strikes in June, the RMT Union has just announced more walkouts on July 27th. In one shred of good news, a proposed strike by British Airways workers over the Summer has been averted.
The entire aviation industry is struggling to recruit new staff after cutting jobs during the pandemic. In May, the chief executive of Airlines UK admitted recruitment is a "serious problem", and warned it would take "a number of years to get back to where we were".
Speaking at the Advantage Travel Partnership conference in Madeira, Tim Alderslade said people who left the sector during Covid don’t want to go back.
"I don’t want to go back to Brexit but we just don’t have access to the labour that we used to," he said.
"People have left aviation to go and work in other parts of the economy and realised – I’ve got a better life doing this."
A baggage handler at one of London’s busiest airports recently told me that one of the biggest problems is poor pay. He said new recruits were being paid less than £10 an hour, and around six in 10 leave when they realise they "can go down the road to Lidl, Aldi, Tesco, and get a job that pays more for doing a lot less, in an environment that probably isn't going to kill them if they make a wrong move".
He added: "The industry is undervalued and underpaid, this is a really difficult job done at really difficult times and it needs to pay better. If it paid better, you would have more staff."
The government and the Civil Aviation Authority has ordered airlines and airports to review summer schedules to make sure they are deliverable, whilst maintaining safety and security.
A cut of 4,000 passengers a day until September 11th has been the outcome of Heathrow’s review. We’re still waiting for others around the country – and millions will now be anxiously checking their inboxes to find out if they should even bother packing.
