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Hundreds of flights to the UK have been cancelled as the aviation industry struggles to cope with surging demand. Staffing levels at various airlines were cute during the Covid pandemic, but have yet to rise again to the level necessary to deal with waves of Britons wanting to catch some sun after nearly two years of lockdown. As a result, passengers booked with EasyJet, British Airways, Tui Airways and Wizz Air are among those who have seen their plans to return from half-term or bank holiday breaks disrupted.
EasyJet in particular cancelled dozens of flights last weekend, with a further 26 cancelled yesterday (May 6) that were due to arrive at or depart from Gatwick Airport.
These included flights from destinations such as Bilbao, Madrid and Seville in Spain, Milan and Palermo in Italy, Geneva and Zurich in Switzerland, and Malta.
A teacher told the BBC how she and her husband had been forced to travel to another country to find a flight back to the UK.
The holidaymaker, Kelly, told how they had travelled with EasyJet and were on holiday in Montenegro.
But when their flight was cancelled at the last minute, they were forced to make a 12-hour bus journey to the Croatian city of Split.
She said: “We have had three bus journeys of about 12 hours to get home so fingers crossed tomorrow EasyJet won’t cancel our flight and we will manage to get home…
“We’ve just been very disappointed in easyJet because they took eight hours to find us (emergency) accommodation so we were sat in the bus station last night for four hours.”
Meanwhile Matt Wheeler, 37, said he and his partner had to make emergency childcare arrangements after finding out their EasyJet flight home from Amsterdam had been cancelled yesterday morning.
He said: “It’s a farce… didn’t know about the cancellation until we arrived at the airport at 3.30am, no easyJet staff or any staff that could help us.
“We now have to try and arrange family members to pick our kids up from school/childminders this afternoon and then have them overnight and take them to school tomorrow.
“They’ll have to take time off work (and) we will now miss a day’s work tomorrow as we won’t be home.”
EasyJet was not the airline forced to make sweeping cuts to its flights.
Over 100 short-haul flights at Heathrow Airport were cut by British Airways yesterday, although the airline stressed that affected passengers were given advance notice of the cancellations.
READ MORE: Travel chaos: Holidaymakers stranded across Europe – ‘shambles’ [REVEAL]
Meanwhile, six daily flights at Manchester have been cancelled by Tui Airways.
Aviation data firm Cirium report that around 225 departures from UK airports were cancelled between Monday and Friday last week.
In the same half-term week last year, the figure was just 24.
Travel consultancy The PC Agency estimated that at least 15,000 passengers were affected by “last-minute changes” to flights on Sunday.
Paul Charles, the consultancy’s chief executive, said this caused “major knock-on effects” and “it will take three days to clear the backlog”.
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