Tens of thousands of passengers are facing travel disruption after easyJet axed 1,700 summer flights, as Britain's biggest budget airline battles with daily cancellations at its main base at Gatwick airport. They have told 180,000 passengers that their departures in July, August and September have been grounded.
The firm says 95% of affected travellers have been rebooked on other easyJet flights, leaving 9,000 currently without a replacement. Under European air rules, passengers whose flights are cancelled are entitled to travel on any other airline that has seats available on the original day of travel, at easyJet’s expense.
Passengers whose flights are grounded with less than two weeks’ notice are also entitled to cash compensation of £220 for flights less than 1,500km (e.g. Spain), or £350 for flights more than 1,500km(e.g. the Canary Islands) unless easyJet can rebook them on a flight that arrives close to the original time.
These cancellations which are taking a large chunk of capacity out of the summer market, in a year when seats are already scarce, will force fares higher and reduce availability for people who have not yet booked their holidays.
EasyJet claims that “unprecedented” air-traffic control delays, which it says are three times longer than before the pandemic are responsible, but sources have claimed to The Independent newspaper in the UK, that the airline does not have sufficient pilots to operate its promised summer 2023 schedule.
On Saturday alone, easyJet grounded more than 40 flights to and from Gatwick, affecting more than 6,000 passengers. Between them, all of easyJet’s rival airlines only cancelled eight departures and arrivals between them on the same day at the same airport.
Yesterday, Sunday, dozens more easyJet departures were axed, including flights to the key Spanish holiday airports of Barcelona, Alicante and Malaga. In addition, passengers waiting at Gatwick for the last Belfast International flight of the day, and at Budapest for a flight back to London, had their trips cancelled while they were waiting at the boarding gate.
The pressure on Gatwick, which is the world’s busiest single-runway airport, is felt far more by easyJet as they account for almost half of the airport’s flights, more than any other carrier.
Since June 28th, the daily late-evening easyJet flight from Gatwick to Palma de Mallorca, flight number 8091, has been cancelled more often than not.
A spokesperson for easyJet said: “We are currently operating up to around 1,800 flights and carrying around 250,000 customers per day and like all airlines, we review our flights on an ongoing basis”.
The scale of the cancellations could see easyJet lose future summer slots at Gatwick. Permissions to take off and land are awarded on a “use it or lose it” basis, although last summer when easyJet and British Airways made many thousands of cancellations, the government allowed the airlines to retain their slots.
