The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Covid travel chaos may be about to make a comeback
As Gatwick cancels flights due to Covid-19, Greg Dickinson asks whether we could face another winter of discontent
Last Sunday, having just fastened my seatbelt on an easyJet flight from Greece to Gatwick, the pilot made an announcement. We were already an hour delayed, but it would be at least another 75 minutes until we took off, he said. A sigh rippled around the cabin as seatbelts unclicked. Why the delay? Bad weather above Italy, he said, before adding something about “illnesses” at Gatwick’s air traffic control.
Pilots speak in code. And this, it later emerged, was code for the fact that the National Air Traffic Services (Nats) unit at Gatwick had experienced a Covid outbreak. In a statement Gatwick Airport said that 30 per cent of Nats tower staff were unavailable “for a variety of medical reasons, including Covid”.
As a result, the UK’s second busiest airport restricted flight movements to 800 per day. In total, 164 flights were pre-emptively cancelled last week, affecting thousands of passengers.
Not since March 2022, when the UK’s travel restrictions were dropped, have British passengers endured this level of travel disruption due to Covid. Some have rightly pointed out we do not know just how many of those Nats illnesses were Covid cases. But the whole debacle, the very words “Covid” and “cancellations” being uttered in the same breath, brings back dark memories of the on-off travel restrictions of the pandemic.
For some, those memories are particularly raw, such as the people who were unable to visit loved ones abroad in their final days, or attend funerals. The traumas came in other forms, too, whether it was families split apart in squalid isolation facilities abroad, or those who were forced to spend thousands of pounds in mandatory “quarantine hotels” on UK soil. So were this week’s Gatwick cancellations an early sign of things to come this winter?
Paul Charles, the CEO of travel consultancy the PC Agency, became an authority in Covid travel rules during the pandemic. He doubts that we will experience anything as severe as in the early days of the pandemic.
“Governments will be extremely reluctant to shut down borders for such long periods, as their actions had such profound effects on their economies, as well as citizens’ mental wellbeing,” he said. In 2019, the travel and tourism sector contributed £234.5billion to the UK economy, which fell to just under £94billion in 2020, a drop of nearly two thirds. The economic impact continued into 2021 and 2022.
But Dr Richard Dawood, a specialist in travel medicine at the Fleet Street Clinic, warns we should be doing more to prepare for the winter ahead.
“Nobody can predict what lies ahead, but there is a lot we could do to help prevent travel disruption this winter, that we are currently showing no sign of doing or even thinking about,” he said.
“Vaccine manufacturers have ample supplies, so there is no earthly reason why supplies could not be made available for use by people who will be travelling, and by companies who wish to protect their operations,” he said.
While over-65s, the clinically vulnerable and frontline workers get offered the jab for free, the wider public are unable to pay for one, as is possible with the flu jab. Meanwhile, Covid cases are on the rise. So even if you’re sick and tired of the very notion of Covid, if you’re going abroad this winter it would be a wise idea to check that your insurance policy wording includes Covid cover, in case you fall ill and cannot fly.
But rest assured. Nobody – not governments, not the airlines, and certainly not the travelling public – wants to see a return of the absurd traffic light system, or that painstaking procedure of taking a test the day before a flight and praying for the right result. But the virus is still out there, and this week we have been issued a timely reminder that the aviation industry isn’t immune to Covid disruption.
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