Heathrow asks companies not to sell tickets for the summer anymore
Cancellations, hours of delay, rain of ticket refund requests, angry passengers and lost luggage: it is a black summer for air travel and for all those travelers who, after two years of covid and restrictions, were hoping to go on vacation. From Spain to Portugal, from Great Britain to Germany, passing in part also from Italy, the situation in the airports is incandescent.
With Heathrowone of the main European hubs for sorting flightsthat verges on collapse: a real ‘Airmageddon’, is the word coined to describe the situation at the London airport. Shortage of low cost personnel who have not reinstated crews and ground personnel after the cuts linked to: the result, according to leading figures in the sector, is that by mid-July, nearly 16,000 flights had already been canceled for August. Solo Lufthansa announced in recent days the cancellation of another 2,000 until the end of August in the Frankfurt and Munich airports. British Airways ah already cut make thousands of flights summer due to lack of staff, will leave on the ground six more planes a day a short range.
In the eye of the storm remains London’s Heathrow airport, which asked airlines to stop selling tickets for the summer – sparking the reaction of global carriers like Emirates and Delta – putting a cap of 100 thousand passengers a day against a traffic that in the summer pre-pandemic I had not seen passing over 22 million.
In Italymeanwhile, it is expected for on Sunday a strike by low cost airlines Ryanair, Easyjet and Volotea: scheduled for the whole day, it was then reduced to 4 hours (from 14 to 18) by the Guarantor. But the weekend risks being at high risk for those who plan to fly: in fact there is also one on the agenda stopped by the Enav which will see the flight controllers cross their arms, always from 14 to 18.