DAA’s Covid loss now more than €100m, says CEO

DAA has lost well over €100m since the beginning of the pandemic and staff wages cannot be guaranteed at current levels past the end of the month, chief executive Dalton Philips has told staff.

Philips said in a video update sent to staff at Dublin and Cork airports that he would extend a previous commitment to pay staff wages at 80pc for a further two weeks until August 1.

But he delivered a stern warning to staff at the two airports over the progress of negotiations with unions on work practice changes.

If work practice changes he described as “reasonable asks” to allow greater movement of staff between terminals and parts of the business were not agreed by then, a voluntary severance programme could not proceed, he said.

That would mean he “can’t guarantee that we will be able to continue paying wages in those areas at 80pc because the reality is we’ll be overstaffed.”

He said other aviation companies operating in Ireland were only paying 30pc or 50pc of wages.

Continued government restrictions meant traffic — currently about 10,500 passengers a day at Dublin compared with normal summer levels of 100,000 a day — would not bounce back as much as expected in July and August.

“We’ve got to inject some pace into the discussions and wrap this up really quickly because we are losing a lot of money,” he told staff. “We are well past 100 days of this pandemic and we’ve been losing €1m every single day... so well over €100m of losses that we’ve racked up so far, so we’re in a difficult spot,” he said.

Philips said he feared that even if the Government does later this month publish a “green list” of countries to which passengers can travel without quarantine “it may be not as extensive a list as we might have hoped and it may not even be the countries that we thought we would see, particularly Spain, Portugal, Italy.”