Here’s the deal: Just in time for American travelers to get one financial break after a year of surging prices, airports around the world are buckling under the pressure. Everyone’s trying to get out of town, often for their first real vacation in two years, but airports around the world don’t have enough staff to handle the rush.
“Over the past few weeks, as departing passenger numbers have regularly exceeded 100,000 a day, we have started to see periods when service drops to a level that is not acceptable,” said Heathrow’s CEO John Holland-Kaye in an open letter to passengers.
No more than 100,000 departing passengers per day will be allowed to fly out of Heathrow until mid-September, he said. That’s slightly less than the estimated 104,000 a day the airport might otherwise host this summer.
Airlines, dealing with their own staffing shortages, have already scaled back their summer schedules.
But Holland-Kaye said Heathrow’s latest forecast showed an excess number of seats had already been sold, so airlines needed to stop selling tickets immediately.
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Our collective appetite for a good holiday roared back much faster than airports and airlines could rehire the staff they let go of in the spring of 2020. You can blame airlines or onerous regulations, depending on your perspective.
In the best of times, hiring airport workers can be a lengthy process involving background checks and clearances. British Airways told lawmakers in June that it had around 3,000 potential recruits stuck in background checks that are taking up to four months. Other airline executives in that hearing were quick to blame onerous regulations for the travel chaos playing out at airports.
And that’s fair — customers want to know their baggage handlers and ground crew have been thoroughly vetted, but in a labor market as tight as this one, it’s even harder to recruit for those positions.
Heathrow “clearly got it completely wrong,” said Willie Walsh, director general of the International Air Transport Association, the group representing global airlines. “To tell airlines to stop selling — what a ridiculous thing for an airport to say to an airline.”
But airlines have to shoulder some blame here, too. US carriers let go of tens of thousands of workers through buyouts during the pandemic even as they…
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