Winter holidays in the European summer? The keys to a season with chaotic airports and long waits

If you plan to travel to Europe or move within the Old Continent in the coming months, put a good dose of patience in your suitcase.

The pandemic has blocked the European tourism sector. There were very few leisure trips in 2020 and very few in 2021. This year the sector, which accounts for over 10% of European GDP and over 10% of employment, is recovering at such a speed that grabbed companies without the necessary preparation. Traveling in Europe or within Europe has become in recent months an ordeal.

European governments hope that this summer will break all records of tourist arrivals in a continent that has the first tourist power on the planet with the latest pre-pandemic data (France, 89 million visitors), the second (Spain, 83 million), the fifth (Italy, 62 million), the eighth (Germany, 39 million) and the tenth (United Kingdom, 36 million).

But for this the travel industry must start to work better, otherwise the succession of chaotic scenes at airports can cause the dissolution of travelers.

The European Commission, governments and companies now recognize, with the high tourist season already underway, that they did not anticipate such a rapid recovery.

Lack of staff

When the pandemic broke out, airlines, airports, hotels or car rental agencies got rid of their staff. Now I am unable to recover it. Unions say people want jobs that are less exposed to closures and better paid.

Most of the major European airports work at the limit or have exceeded it. In recent weeks travelers have had to queue that are not remembered, over 5 hours of waiting In many cases.

Medium-sized airports without hundreds of flights a day, such as Edinburgh, had a four-hour queue last week for what could normally be done in under 15 minutes. In Amsterdam the passengers and the ground staff of the airlines ended up in the hands.

Flights suspended

Given the impossibility of airports to manage the high number of flights some airlines are massively suspending their frequency.

Brussels Airlines announced that it planned that more than 900 flights would be suspended in July and August alone, affecting over 40,000 people.

For now, smaller secondary airports, used by low-cost airlines to connect small towns near big cities, are more resilient. The flights that depart from these airports are generally cheaper and have much less crowds.

To the situation at the airports are added the threats of a strike by air traffic controllers and communications already underway for the strikes of various airlines, including the low-cost giant Ryanair.

Salary claims to Brussels Airlines led to the suspension of over 200 flights this Monday alone. In normal times, airports require passengers to arrive at their facilities between an hour and a half and two hours before their scheduled departure time. Now they ask for three or more hours.

Everyone in the industry blames each other. The airlines ensure that they have confirmed their flights to the airports with dates and times from the end of March and that they have not been able to adapt. The companies that manage the airports say two or three months is not enough to prepare their facilities (because they have got rid of thousands of employees and are now unable to find replacements).

Airports weren’t sure at the beginning of the year if this northern summer would see tourism take off or if the omicron variant would turn it into another lost summer.

There are those who have taken extreme measures since May, such as that of Amsterdam, which has decided to limit the number of flights to a daily figure lower than that experienced in 2019, despite the fact that it depended on the airlines would be hundreds of more flights.

The train is also not a reliable alternative due to the strikes. From Tuesday to Thursday, over 40,000 British Railways employees will stop working. Thousands of Italian train, bus and ferry employees did so on Friday.

Brussels, special

CB