The chaos in European airports is tarnishing the vacations of thousands of passengers and there are no signs of being resolved in the short term. July is expected to be complicated. A situation that, according to the CEO of Ryanair DAC, Eddie Wilson, could have been avoided with better planning. The main source of problems, says the manager in conversation with La Vanguardia, is in the airport network of “The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany and, to a lesser extent, Ireland”. In Spain, he assures, Aena has better controlled the return to activity, with good planning.
Spanish airports and, in general, those of southern Europe, are enduring the air shower in better conditions than their neighbors to the north. However, in an industry that works in a network, with a large number of actors involved in the value chain, the difficulties of one are transferred to the other. The result of this are the incidents with suitcases that have been experienced these days in El Prat or Barajas – this Wednesday the Barcelona airport suffered a day of flight delays, which the airlines consulted attributed to bad weather.
Be that as it may, Wilson insists, the worst headaches for the sector now come from the north. “In the Netherlands, airports have automatically limited air capacity and force us and other airlines to cancel flights because they have not hired enough staff; so we have to tell people that their vacations are canceled because the Amsterdam airport has not been able to hire more workers, ”says Wilson as an example. In the United Kingdom and Germany – he continues – there is also a shortage of ground handling personnel, “mainly due to Brexit”. “There are many airports that depended on workers from Eastern Europe, who returned to their country with the pandemic because they were fired or because nobody told them they could get their jobs back, and this is poor management,” he adds. Air traffic, moreover, is still below 2019 levels, but more difficulties and delays are occurring.
All this, he admits, has caused Ryanair’s punctuality to drop to 60% last week, when it usually exceeds 90%. “We have enough crew, we have the planes, but this is not a normal situation; although we have fewer problems than the competition, ”he considers. In fact, all this air congestion in Europe is affecting its operations more than “the strikes”, he says. In Spain, USO and Sitcpla have called twelve new days of strike starting on July 12 at the airline to request salary improvements.
The previous protests had a limited impact and Wilson considers that the new mobilizations “will have little follow-up.” Talks with these cabin crew unions are now broken. “Until they show that they have good faith, we will not continue talking,” insists the manager. According to him, the demands of the unions are “unaffordable”. “They ask for salary increases of 166%; they do not want to negotiate, with CC.OO. we have reached an agreement in weeks”, he insists.
All this situation of chaos in European airports and labor unrest, however, is not harming demand at the moment. “People want to travel this summer,” says Wilson. The rise in prices of airline tickets has not scared away customers either. “We have gone from an average fee of 37 euros before the pandemic to one of about 40 euros,” he says. And prices will continue to rise in the coming years, he warns. “There is less supply, because the competition has been reduced, and fuel costs are increasing; although we will continue to be the cheapest in the industry”. The days of ultra-low rates seem to have come to an end.
