On Thursday (12 March), Loganair confirmed it would reduce its March, April and May flight schedules due to coronavirus, with forward bookings down 15-20% since the outbreak developed in the UK.
“We have seen a marked drop in forward bookings in recent days as the effects of the coronavirus on the travelling public’s confidence has worsened,” said chief executive Hinkles.
“The trend is visible throughout the Loganair network, and there are no signs of the hoped-for ‘staycation’ effect, with people remaining in the UK for future planned holidays instead of travelling overseas.”
Hinkles said the effect, at present, appeared only to be short-term, hitting bookings for the remainder of March, as well as April and May, but warned the situation would likely deteriorate.
Loganair had already trimmed around 10% (700) of its planned flights for April and May.
“With a greater deterioration in bookings since those decisions were taken last week, we are now about to embark on a further round of schedule reductions,” said Hinkles.
“I am expecting a further 10% of flights will be cancelled for April and May. We will work to provide as much notice as possible to customers when flight cancellations are made.”
Hinkles said alternative flights or refunds would be offered, and stressed no island community in the UK served by Loganair would be left without an air service.
“We recognise there are unique considerations around Loganair flights being used to deliver island pharmaceutical supplies, fly blood samples to testing laboratories and a host of other dependencies on our services,” said Hinkles.
“We will do all we reasonably can to take these into account when taking decisions around schedule reductions.”
Hinkles added the now 17 UK routes formerly flown by Flybe that Loganair picked up last week “will go ahead as announced”, but with “a possible short delay in the launch of some routes”.
“None of the service reductions made due to the Covid-19 impact are related to this expansion, and any capacity released from cancelled services is being used to bolster our aircraft and aircrew standby capacity for resilience reasons,” said Hinkles.
