Anne writes: “I am full of anxiety.” She is among the distraught prospective travellers who have contacted me over the past two months since the US-Israeli attacks on Iran and subsequent retaliation, leading to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and disruption of oil exports.
In December, Anne planned an extended family trip to Crete in July. “We bought our easyJet tickets early January, long before Trump kicked off with Iran,” she writes.
“I paid the hotel £6,000 deposit. The £6,000 remainder is due at the beginning of June. If I don’t pay the balance, I stand to lose our booking and the deposit. My concern is with the fuel shortage. The hotel isn’t being helpful at all. I contacted my travel insurers, but they are useless and say that they don’t cover ‘acts of war’. I may be panicking unnecessarily, but I feel so exposed financially at present.”
I have already written to Anne to assure that easyJet intends to fly its full schedule – and explaining that under air passengers’ rights rules, any airline that cancels a flight has to get her party of 11 to the Greek island, and bring them home, as close to the original schedule as possible.
On Sunday morning, the government set out plans “to protect summer holidays from disruption” in the face of concerns about a shortage of aviation fuel. Basically, airlines serving the UK have been told that if they look like having to ground flights because of a possible jet fuel shortage, they should do it sooner rather than later – to avoid last-minute cancellations and give passengers more certainty.
The aim: if shortages start to loom, airlines will be allowed to cancel flights without losing precious “slots” at key aviation hubs, including the London airports, Birmingham, Bristol and Manchester.
With demand fairly weak, some airlines are likely to jump at the chance of saving money by cancelling flights that would otherwise be loss-making. But peak-season flights to Crete are profitable, especially as the fuel powering the engines is cheaper than the market price to airlines “hedging” – locking into forward contracts.
The government says that airlines would be allowed to “consolidate schedules on routes where there are multiple flights to the same destination on the same day”. A typical example: Lufthansa has 10 flights a day from London Heathrow to Frankfurt. Peak summer is quiet for business – partly because corporate travellers tend to be on holiday.
Axing a few Heathrow to Frankfurt flights and shifting passengers earlier or later by an hour or two will have far less of an impact – emotionally on the passenger and financially for the airline – than grounding holiday flights to a Greek island.
But what if deeper cuts are needed? In the spirit of preserving Anne’s, your, and my right to look forward to our holidays, these are some measures that ministers should keep in their back pockets.
Cancel many domestic flights within Great Britain
Do we really need 14 flights a day between Manchester and London Heathrow, and a further dozen linking Newcastle with the capital? Most of these are clearly aimed at passengers connecting at the UK’s biggest airport. The earliest departures each day may have some merit for this purpose, but passengers travelling in the middle of the day could be switched to trains.
From Edinburgh and Glasgow to London, there is also plenty of connecting travel – but easyJet and Ryanair are strictly point-to-point. Reversing the cut in air passenger duty implemented by Rishi Sunak would assist price-sensitive passengers to decide to switch to LNER, Lumo or Avanti West Coast.
Put a pit stop on the longest flights
The longest flight from the UK – the Qantas London-Perth trip, covering over 9,000 miles – is incredibly thirsty. The plane passes over, or very close to, both Mumbai in India and Colombo in Sri Lanka. If the Boeing 787 refilled there, I calculate the overall fuel saving would be at least 15 per cent. The same could be done with flights from the UK to Hong Kong, Tokyo and Santiago in Chile.
End the Inverness tax hack
An absurd alleviation that means premium-economy passengers who start their journey to some far-flung destination in Inverness avoid air passenger duty, while those in nearby Aberdeen pay £253. Guess what: some passengers fly to Inverness purely to turn around and fly back to embark on a tax-free trip.
Ministers should ‘fly commercial’
The government planes that fly ministers around the nation and the world should be grounded, removing the temptation that Liz Truss could not resist while foreign secretary to take an Airbus A321 private jet to Australia, even though Qantas had perfectly good commercial flights at the right times.
Simon Calder, also known as The Man Who Pays His Way, has been writing about travel for The Independent since 1994. In his weekly opinion column, he explores a key travel issue – and what it means for you.
