Cancellations, hours of delays, rain of ticket refund requests, angry passengers and lost luggage: it's 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 despite the pandemic is raising its head.
From Spain to Portugal, from Great Britain to Germany, passing in part also from Italy, the situation in the airports is incandescent.
Like temperatures.
With Heathrow, one of the main European hubs for sorting flights of the old continent and intercontinental, which is on the verge of collapse: a real 'Airmageddon', is the word coined to describe the situation at the London airport.
Shortage of personnel, low cost ones that have not reinstated crews and ground personnel after the cuts linked to the pandemic, the picture is complicated.
And the result, according to initial industry estimates, is that by mid-July there were already almost 16,000 flights canceled for August.
That is about 2% of the total.
Only Lufthansa, the German airline, has announced in recent days the cancellation of another 2,000 flights until the end of August in the airports of Frankfurt and Munich.
But in the eye of the storm remains London Heathrow airport, which in recent days has asked airlines to stop selling tickets for the summer - sparking the reaction of global carriers such as Emirates and Delta - putting a maximum limit of 100 thousand passengers a day against a traffic that in
pre-pandemic summer had seen over 22 million transit, earning the airport the top spot for number of travelers.
An unprecedented decision, which follows the one taken at the end of April by Amsterdam Schipol airport, whose management company had asked the airlines to cancel flights and not accept new bookings, again due to personnel problems.
John Holland-Kaye, head of Heathrow, spoke of "periods when the service expires at an unacceptable level with long queues, delays for passengers requiring assistance, baggage not traveling with passengers, late arrivals, poor punctuality and last minute cancellations ".
While British airline Virgin Atlantic has said it supports Heathrow's policy "as long as the proposed action does not have a disproportionate impact on source carriers at the airport," British Airways, which has already cut tens of thousands of summer flights due to shortages. staffed, will leave another six short-haul aircraft grounded a day as Emirates pushed back, calling a situation it called 'airmageddon' "unreasonable and unacceptable".
In Italy, meanwhile, a strike by the low cost airlines Ryanair, Easyjet and Volotea is expected for next Sunday: 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: on the agenda there is also the stop announced by ENAV which will see the flight controllers cross their arms, always from 14 to 18. On Google Trends, meanwhile, the most searched words are 'flight delays', 'flight cancellations' and 'compensation for delayed flights'.
According to Iata, domestic traffic globally is expected to return to pre-crisis levels in 2023 and 2025 for long-haul routes,
