Heathrow warning – MORE flights to be cancelled during school summer holidays as airlines told to stop selling tickets
BRITS face more holiday misery this summer as Heathrow Airport is to cap the number of daily passengers for the next two months.
The airport said it has introduced a cap of 100,000 daily departing passengers until September 11 – which will result in even more cancelled flights.
Heathrow boss John Holland-Kaye said in a statement that the decision was made as the airport can only serve 100,000 as the “maximum number of daily departing passengers”.
Exceeding this number, he warned, leads to “long queue times, delays for passengers requiring assistance, bags not travelling with passengers or arriving late, low punctuality and last-minute cancellations”.
He explained: “The latest forecasts indicate that even despite the amnesty, daily departing seats over the summer will average 104,000 – giving a daily excess of 4,000 seats.
“On average only about 1,500 of these 4,000 daily seats have currently been sold to passengers, and so we are asking our airline partners to stop selling summer tickets to limit the impact on passengers.
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“By making this intervention now, our objective is to protect flights for the vast majority of passengers at Heathrow this summer and to give confidence that everyone who does travel through the airport will have a safe and reliable journey and arrive at their destination with their bags.
“We recognise that this will mean some summer journeys will either be moved to another day, another airport or be cancelled and we apologise to those whose travel plans are affected.”
Brits travelling through the UK’s busiest airport have faced chaotic scenes in recent weeks, with British Airways and easyJet cancelling thousands of flights and baggage piling up at reclaim.
European airlines Lufthansa and Wizz Air have also cancelled hundreds of flights in recent weeks.
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The boss of Heathrow has said sorry for heaping misery on holidaymakers after warning there will be even more chaos to come.
The UK’s busiest airport cancelled 61 flights yesterday at short notice, blaming a higher number of passengers in its Terminal 3 and Terminal 5 than it had capacity to deal with.
And Heathrow has begged holiday-makers not to arrive more than three hours early for their flight to prevent huge queues.
A spokesperson said: “Passengers are reminded to arrive at the airport three hours before both a European and long haul flight.
“We ask passengers not to arrive earlier than this as this may cause unnecessary congestion in the airport.”
The situation at the airport, which is already dire, is likely to worsen in the weeks to come.
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But it’s not just Heathrow that has been experiencing travel chaos, as passengers at Birmingham Airport also faced a lengthy wait.
And travel chaos continued at Gatwick Airport, with passengers complaining yesterday of lengthy queues, missing transport and even being locked in a stairwell.