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ARCHIVED - Ryanair reduces flights by 20 percent as Spanish Covid expansion hits bookings hard
Bookings on Ryanair have fallen noticeably due to the ongoing Covid pandemic
Ryanair announces reduction in flight capacity by 20% in September and October due to a "notable weakening of bookings over the last ten days".
The airline said the drop was driven by "uncertainty over recent Covid case rates in some EU countries".
A spokesman for Ryanair said: "These capacity cuts and frequency reductions for the months of September and October are unavoidable given the recent weakness in forward bookings due to Covid restrictions in a number of EU countries.
"Any affected passengers in September received email notification earlier today advising them of their options."
Since the British Government imposed a 14 day quarantine on travellers from Spain, aircraft have been arriving in Spain half empty, as thousands of holidays are cancelled and travellers make the difficult decision whether a 14 day quarantine and rising covid numbers are worth the price of a week in the sun, many deciding they’re not and simply not flying.
As case numbers in Spain continue to rise (see 16,000 new covid cases over the weekend in Spain posted yesterday for latest figures) the chances of a UK quarantine being removed is increasingly unlikely every day and across Europe travel to and from countries in which Covid cases are rising is becoming more complicated on a daily basis.
It’s absolutely inevitable that the airlines are being forced into making massive cuts and having to change their services and schedules to try and react to the current situation, changing flights to locations in which there is no quarantine restriction and they have a greater chance of selling flights and holidays.
Here in Murcia this is translating into a considerable number of flight cancellations; Jet2 has already cancelled all remaining flights into Corvera airport this year and changed its focus to countries such as Turkey; last night it was advertising holidays in Turkey on primetime TV.
Easyjet has consolidated services into Murcia and Alicante, reducing flight frequency to continue offering a level of service, albeit with reduced flights. Its financial survival plan has involved closing bases in Stansted, Southend and Newcastle, with the loss of 670 jobs and cutting staff . In May the company announced its intention of shedding 4,500 jobs and most staff are accepting redundancy packages.
Johan Lundgren, Easyjet chief executive, said in a statement that the decision to close the bases had been "very difficult", and that it was taken due to the "unprecedented impact of the pandemic and related travel restrictions".
This has been compounded by quarantine measures in the UK hitting demand for travel, he added.
Ryanair has now confirmed what readers already know; that they too are consolidating flight schedules, cancelling the frequency of flights and consolidating routes, making a formal announcement to the effect that they are reducing flight capacity by 20% in September and October due to a notable weakening of bookings over the last ten days.
"Over the past two weeks as a number of EU countries have raised travel restrictions, forward bookings especially for business travel into September and October have been negatively affected, and it makes sense to reduce frequencies so that we tailor our capacity to demand over the next 2 months," a spokesperson said.
Flights in and out of Ireland, Spain, France and Sweden, as well as other countries where travel restrictions remain or have been increased due to rising Covid-19 case rates, will bear the brunt of the cuts, the airline said.
Ryanair has been a vocal critic of the way in which the UK Government has handled the Covid crisis, in particular the policy of imposing quarantine and has called once again for testing in airports as an alternative to quarantine:
"Proper testing at airports, and effective tracing (as is being conducted in Germany and Italy) is the only realistic and proportionate method of supervising safe intra-EU travel while effectively limiting the spread of the Covid-19 virus," the airline said.
The whole of the aviation sector has been devastated by the Covid pandemic, with tens of thousands of job losses in the airlines, aircraft manufacturing sector and ancillary businesses, airports, catering companies and the tourism sector as a whole.
Ryanair's struggle for solvency is no different to that being experienced by many other airlines; British Airways wants to axe 12,000 jobs, Emirates has said that as many as 9,000 could go, and the cuts are already feeding out into manufacturing; Airbus announced plans to cut 15,000 jobs in June, aero-engine manufacturer Rolls Royce will axe 8,000 roles and on it goes into an uncertain future.
For those of us here in Murcia it is inevitable that the airlines will consolidate Murcia flights and move flights to Alicante where there is a greater chance of filling the planes; whether we will have any flights to Corvera once winter schedules start remains to be seen; certainly passengers hoping to travel here via Ryainair on certain routes are seeing little more than empty grey boxes on their screens when attempting to book at the moment!
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