Families are braced for further Easter travel chaos as easyJet said it expected to cancel more flights in the coming days.
Travellers were this week facing hours-long queues at airports after a spate of flight cancellations, brought about by severe staff shortages.
EasyJet is expected to cancel another 70 flights to and from the UK today, following days of travel havoc across the country. More than 1,000 flights have been cancelled over the past week, according to data company Cirium, compared to 197 the same week in 2019.
EasyJet warned that disruption was likely to extend over the Easter holidays.
It said it would “operate the vast majority of its 1,525 flights today with a small proportion cancelled in advance to give customers the ability to rebook onto alternative flights”.
The company said preemptive cancellations would continue over the coming days at a “similar level” due to the ongoing high level of sickness.
A spokesman added: “We are sorry for any inconvenience for affected customers.”
Passengers travelling on other airlines are also being hit by last-minute cancellations, with hundreds more flights expected to be wiped from schedules in the coming days. Airlines are blaming a surge in Covid cases for causing absences to double compared with their normal levels.
It comes after many airlines sacked thousands of workers at the beginning of the pandemic, with insiders saying that lengthy wait-times for security checks on prospective staff were now delaying the recruitment of new employees.
EasyJet has said that it has “sufficient operating crew and standby crew to manage normal levels of sickness”.
It added: “Unfortunately, high Covid infections across Europe have led to unusually high levels of crew sickness, more than double the normal rate.”
British Airways cut 115 of its journeys for Monday owing to staff shortages, and has reduced its schedule for the coming weeks. At least 98 flights which had been due to fly to or from Heathrow for Tuesday were cancelled.
It said: “Aviation has been one of the industries worst hit by the pandemic and airlines and airports are experiencing the same issues rebuilding their operations while managing the continuing impact of Covid.
“So while the vast majority of our flights continue to operate as planned, as a precaution we’ve slightly reduced our schedule between now and the end of May as we ramp back up.”
Industry experts said this process to get airlines back up to full capacity could take some time. John Strickland, director of transport consultancy JLS Consulting, said it would be “very difficult” for many airlines for the next few months.
Speaking to BBC’s Wake Up To Money, Mr Strickland said: “I think certainly the next month or two are going to be very difficult.
“We know that Manchester has said that passengers should expect queues for one to two hours for the next several weeks while they undertake additional training.”
Consumer groups, meanwhile, criticised the lack of guidance for travellers, who are still being told to “arrive early” for flights, but are not being given any sense of how long they could be queuing.
Rory Boland, the travel editor at Which?, said: “Airports know how many passengers there will be each day and how many staff there are, roughly. They should give passengers a concrete time to the hour to arrive.”
