Internaut

Hiding among all the Tory stuff in the Sky headlines. I wonder if similarly troubled MAN will follow?

Gagravarr

More details including the letter from Heathrow on Head for Points - https://www.headforpoints.com/2022/0...1th-september/

lhrsfo

If I were an airline operating from LHR, I would be demanding significant compensation from LHR for a complete failure to provide adequate service. The losses are easily quantifiable.

As to LHR and its regulatory status within the UK, this clearly needs a substantial reset. This is the company that issues promises regarding a new project and then breaks them as soon as they get planning permission. TIghter regulation and lower charges should be imposed until the owners are forced out and a more skilled airport operator can be installed. All trust has now been lost.

GregWTravels

Heathrow tells airlines to stop selling summer tickets

The Heathrow boss says that more tickets have already been sold than they are capable of handling, and so is asking that no more tickets are sold for dates from now until September 11th.

Kgmm77

I admire your confidence that the losses are easily calculable. I don’t share that view.

It appears all parties involved have been playing a giant game of chicken all summer, each hoping the other will move first and throw the towel in from a capacity perspective. BA may well say they are able to operate at the BAA revised cap + x% and should be compensated on that lost revenue, but why would we believe them?! They’ve repeatedly gone back to the well to revise downwards their own schedule, it would appear as much due to circumstances within their control as outside.

I agree the whole situation is a mess, but I wouldn’t be so quick to apportion blame in one specific direction.

lhrsfo

A ban on new ticket sales and a ban on accommodating people whose flights have been cancelled would be fairly easily calculable in terms of liquidated damages. For example, many Business Class seats are sold shortly before the flight (I know fewer in summer but still a number, and airlines will know what that number is). Likewise, having to route connecting passengers through a different hub has a direct cost to it. The proposal, I suspect, is really aimed at airlines who have been irresponsible but those airlines which are operating a reliable system will be heavily punished. More than just BA and VS use LHR. Other airlines have reduced their schedules to match their staffing, although they do have to rely on their contracting partners (eg LHR) to provide the services that they have contracted.

I also find it interesting that LHR is proposing to ban people whose flight has been cancelled being accommodated on another flight. So, for example, if an incoming flight goes mechanical, then the passengers waiting for the return get stuck? Plus the proposal seems to suggest that an individual cannot leave through LHR for urgent business, or for family matters. Or indeed, should a politician need to attend the funeral of a foreign dignitary, she can't - as who would dare break the rules nowadays.

Frankly John Holland-Kaye is trying to play dictator, and it ended badly for the last person who tried to do that.

Internaut

I don't want to go too Omni/PR with this post but we had a furlough scheme that allowed a great many people to go home until needed again. That was the point of the scheme; allow the economy to fire back up quickly once circumstances allowed. The failure of LHR, MAN and the major ground services company can't go without comment. Nor should it go without consequences to the businesses in question. And the fact that the one airline at MAN that does all its own ground services was able to simply start back up and return to near-normal suggests the problem was not with furlough!

angetenar

Doesn't Heathrow charge really high fees to passengers/airlines? Where is that money going?

rcopus

Shareholders/investors - seems its almost illegal these days for them to ever be in a position of loss.

IAH-OIL-TRASH

LHR is going to cap the number of departing passengers through mid-September. I'm not sure how airlines are supposed to figure out how collectively to stay under the cap and how LHR authority is going to enforce the cap if more than 100k pax show up on any given day. Zero guidance. What are they going to do - open the doors at 4am and let the 100k anxious passengers who have assembled overnight so they don't miss their flight in???? Whoever shows up at 7am is screwed? It could lead to utter pandemonium. This almost feels like an April Fool's Day joke. TPG article, via MSN:

Heathrow asks airlines to stop selling summer tickets and caps passenger numbers until September (msn.com)

Lux Flyer

I think the way LHR is looking at this is an initial cooperative plead to airlines to make changes on their own to help alleviate passenger counts that are overwhelming and not force the airport to resort to draconian methods which will be a bigger pain for airlines to meet/cause disruption to their flight schedules (and lose LHR money in landing/usage fees). Ultimately what will happen if the passenger counts don't improve, LHR will just resort to imposing flow control on passenger air traffic (going beyond their existing slots system) to reduce how many flights can operate each day, thereby forcing the passenger counts down to levels they are staffed to handle.

AirbusFan2B

According to article: decisions will fall to Airport Coordination Ltd, the world’s largest slot coordinator.

IAH-OIL-TRASH

One would hope they would cancel all flights from originations easily served by train (notably England/Scotland/Netherlands/Belgium/Paris).

Lux Flyer

But more realistically, to avoid exposing themselves to a lawsuit from a subset of airlines arguing they're being unfairly singled out for flight cancellations based on the routes they fly (and therefore being penalized with lost revenue more than a competitor might be), they will proportionally reduce everyone's allocation based on the number of passengers they're expected to carry on the flights they have scheduled. At least, that's what I would do as an airport operator to cover myself legally if I was forced to implement this type of policy, to make sure I can argue in court that the policy was being applied equally to all airlines. Which again, is why I would ask the airlines to voluntarily try to make things work before I take that step.

:D!

Connecting flights are a thing, particularly as Heathrow is poorly connected to the trains to those destinations, though I do agree that flying should be discouraged where trains are a reasonable alternative.