NEWS t on the high street, aviation challenges and prospects for 2024. By Travel Weekly reporters
Aviation infrastructure ‘is operating on a knife-edge’
T
Kirsten Hughes, Travel
Counsellors
he airline sector is “operating on a knife-edge” due to limited infrastructure in the UK, according to the chief executive of The Board of Airline Representatives (Bar UK).
Dale Keller said the industry had suffered “decades of
underinvestment”, which meant it was a case of damage limitation for airlines when something went wrong, such as the air traffic control meltdown over the August bank holiday weekend. “We’ve got the third-biggest aviation market in the
world in a relatively small and densely populated space,” he said. “If you look at Heathrow and Gatwick, they’re on postage-stamp plots of land compared with what you find overseas, with no space to build new and bigger terminals. Plus, we haven’t got the runway capacity we need. “We’re sweating all the assets, which means the moment
something goes wrong, such as the Nats issue, we don’t have the space and infrastructure to build in the resilience.” Keller said that when a major problem arises, it’s a case
of “assessing what level of bad we’re dealing with and how quickly we can recover”. The sector had operated on a “knife-edge” in the
years before the Covid-19 pandemic, he added, and had returned to that position now demand has returned. Keller said that on days of normal operating conditions,
Dale Keller
the sector “makes something that’s incredibly difficult look incredibly easy”. But he added: “When it goes wrong, it can go
spectacularly wrong, and we need to have more honest conversations about that.” Keller said the sector’s key objectives are returning
airlines’ schedules to normal at a faster pace and improving customer service when disruption hits. “The government knows we can’t miraculously have a
‘no disruption environment’, but it wants us to get better at recovering more quickly and treating our customers better – those are our key objectives,” he told attendees.
RESILIENT PART OF SOCIETY
Value for money will remain key next year, say travel bosses
Offering value for money will be key in 2024 as the economy continues to threaten the sector’s recovery, according to three leading travel chiefs. Jet2 chief executive Steve Heapy,
easyJet holidays chief executive Garry Wilson and Tui Northern Region managing director Andrew Flintham agreed the cost-of-living crisis remains a concern despite the Bank of England announcing it would not raise interest rates further on September 21. Flintham said: “We haven’t really
seen the cost-of-living crisis hit in the way we feared it would. The broad macro
travelweekly.co.uk
piece [to ongoing demand] is always the economy and how much people have in their pockets.” He added the company expects customers to shorten the duration of their trips to cut costs. Heapy agreed, saying there is a “long
way to go” until the sector has fully recovered from the Covid pandemic. Wilson said: “Value for money is
important. People are happy to pay more through an agent, but they need to make sure they’re getting the unique
Steve Heapy
information to make better decisions.” i Read more from Future of Travel on
travelweekly.co.uk and in next week’s edition
28 SEPTEMBER 2023 11
PICTURES: Sarah Lucy Brown
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