Heathrow on Tuesday (12 July) told airlines in an open letter it was capping capacity until 11 September with immediate effect, and urged carriers to stop selling new tickets for the summer admitting it could not currently cope with any more passengers.
"New colleagues are learning fast but are not yet up to full speed," said Heathrow chief executive John Holland-Kaye. "There are some critical functions which are still significantly under-resourced."
He placed some of the blame with Heathrow’s airlines, highlighting issues with the ground handlers – contracted by the carriers – that provide check-in staff, load and unload bags and turnaround aircraft.
Virgin Atlantic chief customer and operating officer Corneel Koster, speaking to TTG at the launch of its new Airbus A330-900 aircraft just hours after the capacity cap was announced, said something needed to be done to address the issue, and stressed Virgin was ready and able to fly its schedule in full.
"The end-to-end [flying] experience isn’t what it should be," he said. "The entire [aviation] eco-system is under pressure – we’re not immune to that and we do understand it. It looks like something will need to be done at Heathrow in the coming days and weeks. We will work with Heathrow to see what that is.
"But we do have concerns that there has to be a balance between the concerns around the customer experience, the queues at security, the baggage issues, etc, and also getting customers away. These customers deserve their break, they need to travel. We want to balance both.
"We need to understand their [Heathrow’s] proposals better because they haven’t shared many facts. We have some ideas ourselves about some things that could still help. Something needs to be done, but we don’t feel we should give up this summer."
Virgin withdrew from Gatwick during the pandemic and moved its entire London operation to Heathrow. It plans to debut the A330-900 on its Heathrow-Boston route in October. "The Heathrow community [of airlines] has throughout the pandemic always worked together on Covid-related issues," said Koster.
"But these are very different issues. We will work with Heathrow, other service partners, providers, the people who are part of this eco-system – there’s a lot of work to do. But we will work with other players to get to a better place."
Koster added: "We’re clearly – and we’ve evidenced it, we’ve proved it – ready to fly our customers. We have a completion factor of more than 99.5% over the past six months. We’re completing our schedule to a very high degree. We’re getting our customers moving."
