The airline, which operates six daily flights from Heathrow, has rejected the new limits as “totally unreasonable and unacceptable”. Heathrow, like other airports, has struggled to cope with a recovery in travelers after two years of pandemic restrictions and staff cuts. The airport announced on Tuesday that it will limit the daily number of departing passengers to 100,000 by September 11. “[London Heathrow] chose not to act, not to plan, not to invest. “Now, faced with an ‘airmageddon’ situation due to their incompetence and inaction, they are putting the full burden – of the costs and the struggle to sort out the mess – on the airlines and travellers,” the airline said in a statement. The company said Heathrow had given it just 36 hours to comply with the new cap and threatened legal action against airlines that refuse to comply. It added that it had enough ground handling and catering staff to handle its flights at the airport. Emirates said Heathrow’s management team had been “cavalier about their airline travelers and customers” and had failed to re-hire and train enough staff ahead of the predictable increase in summer travel. On average, Heathrow handled almost 220,000 passengers each day, split between arrivals and departures, in 2018. A Heathrow spokesman told CNN Business that a major cause of flight delays and cancellations was a lack of airline ground handling teams, which he said are only staffed at 70% of pre-pandemic levels. “For months we have been asking airlines to help come up with a plan to solve their resource challenges, but there were no clear plans and every day the problem got worse,” the spokesman said. Heathrow chief executive John Holland-Kaye said in an open letter to passengers on Tuesday that airlines had sold too many seats for the coming months. “Daily departure seats during the summer will average 104,000 — giving a daily excess of 4,000 seats. On average only around 1,500 of these 4,000 daily seats have currently been sold to passengers,” the letter said.
Classification game
Emirates said it would be “impossible” to rebook all potentially affected passengers on new flights in the coming weeks. It said the daily cap of 100,000 departing passengers was a figure that “seems[ed] to [have been] removed from the air’ and will continue to operate as scheduled. It is not just Emirates that is angry. Willie Walsh, director general of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) and former chief executive of British Airways owner IAG, told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday that the travel restrictions were “ridiculous”. “The airlines are predicting stronger traffic than Heathrow was predicting … they clearly got it completely wrong,” he said. Walsh also accused Heathrow of trying to “maximize the profitability they get from the airport at the expense of the airlines”. Heathrow rejected Walsh’s comments. “What we need is collaborative work and investment in services to protect passengers, not ill-informed comments from retired airlines,” a spokesperson told CNN Business on Wednesday. — Sharon Browne-Peter contributed reporting.
