x229cle

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...virus-pandemic
Not BA-specific, but an interesting read.

13901

from the article: Oh Richard Richard. Please don't ever employ that pronunciation the next time you do a talk in Rome please.

BOH

Very interesting read. Shows how wrong a lot of people were claiming back in March that this was only temporary, would only last a few months, airlines were overreacting etc etc. This is going to last for a long time, probably until a vaccine is developed.

I flew out of LHR on Saturday on a 95% full flight to PSA and T5 almost seemed normal. But then I remember that BA is only flying half the services to PSA that it used to and T5 now has all BA's T3 flights operating from there, plus some of the LGW services and also AA and Qatar etc too now.

lost_in_translation

Back in March? Lots of people were still bizarrely claiming this was going to be a very short term disruption in July/August! I do believe this is still Unite's official position...

I think it's only now the vast majority of people seem to finally be accepting it will be 2021 at the earliest before the aviation industry even returns to something approaching normality over recent times and even that is far from certain.

Nimrod1965

A very interesting article; I think that 2021 will be much the same as this year.

nmpls

Until a vaccine is widely available and approved by the majority of bodies.
Like we might have a vaccine that someone can get in January or December, but I suspect 99% of FTers won't be able to get one until spring, and even then, only some. At this point, I'm hoping international travel might restart at scale in 2022, but it certainly won't be at 2019 levels.

londonsmiler

I like how the article points to this accelerating patterns that were already appearing (eg the new BA point to point routes for smaller US cities) rather than just throwing up hands and crying “calamity”.

A rather well researched and interesting article!

GSTBD

There will be mass riots and revolts if governments think they can restrict the freedoms of the masses for another year. Already those at (almost) zero risk of dieing are giving the rules a stiff ignoring.

James91

I agree, in the UK at least. The government having to pass laws to make restrictions mandatory because people are consistently ignoring them is evidence of that. However, I think "the masses" would give up travel for a while in exchange for a more normal day to day existence. Sucks for us FTers, I know.

allturnleft

Its like we have gone back 30 years

Do we need an airline model to match this

Higher prices, fewer flights , higher quality

brunos

I doubt that any airline executive believes that they will return to anything near normality by the end of 2021, especially longhaul. Certainly nothing like 50% traffic.

lost_in_translation

I disagree, I think there are still quite a lot of people expecting to get back to at least 50% of previous traffic by the end of 2021. They may even be right, but time will tell.

BOH

I agree with you totally. Some of the rules seem to border on farcical - like the 22:00 curfew on pubs etc that just means people go out an hour earlier and then pile into off licences at 22:05 to stock up to go to someones house. At the off-licence and at someones house, all rules of social distancing are lost whereas in a pub at least some can be maintained.

The one that is also farcical is BA's insistence on arrival that pax are disembarked 4-5 rows at a time and everyone else remains seated. The risk of a pax in say row 6 catching something from another pax in row 10, 18 or 26 when everyone is standing up is laughably small. However the risk of a pax in row 7 catching something from a stranger in row 6 or 8 is much more likely when everyone is stands in close proximity to retrieve their bags......but this is exactly what BA are asking pax to do on arrival, ie stand in close facial proximity to the complete strangers in the row in front of you and behind you

The only way is to do it is one row standing at a time (am not advocating this!!) but the way BA currently does it achieves absolutely nothing. Probably why it is so roundly ignored, amongst so many other knee-jerk silly rules around Covid distancing.

moral_low_ground

I think the people who thought 50% achievable have been proved wrong. Just last week LH group stated that they too thought 50%. Traffic rose a bit through July/August but has basically collapsed and they are now predicting 20-30%.

BA's schedule must be well below 50% of Pre-covid looking at the Oct schedule and many of the places they are hoping to fly to in the Winter schedule either are closed, on lock down, quarantine or whatever but no one is likely to want to go for leisure and business travel is zero (or close to).

Businesses are now trialing going back to work on a very limited basis but there are no conferences, customer meetings etc and therefore things likely to remain sh*t until summer next year at the earliest. Will be interesting to see who can last that long without govt support or without some other large injection of cash.

CirrusDesAigles

Polling in the United Kingdom strongly suggests this is not the case. The public have been heavily in favour of (amongst other things) further lockdown, hospitality curfews, more enforced closures of hospitality, fines for breaches and crucially for us, quarantining of people returning from abroad (with no sympathy for travellers having to quarantine/return home early receiving a huge majority on You Gov).

Now, I don't personally agree with the UK public on some of this stuff but to suggest the masses are tiring of it is wide of the mark.