August 25 - Travel chaos arrived before the bank holiday started
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 25 August 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Bank holiday travel chaos arrived earlier than expected, with thousands of travellers stranded in various parts of Europe after large-scale cancellations – particularly on British Airways to and from Heathrow and easyJet to and from Gatwick. The cause: a combination of air-traffic control hold-ups and adverse weather. But whatever the cause of a cancelled flight, the airline has clear responsibilities towards passengers.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It is Friday the 25th of August, which means that it's the bank holiday weekend. And, well, I tried to set the scene yesterday with the problems that you could face, particularly on the rails and the roads, of course, a national rail strike across England tomorrow, but actually it's the skies where you've seen really difficult times. Let me just talk through what we are seeing. The problems really began yesterday afternoon. What we had was, |
| 0:42.0 | effectively, bad weather, particularly at Gatwick, actually stopped departures for a while. |
| 0:48.7 | We also had air traffic control problems, some of them related to the difficulties with weather across |
| 0:55.2 | Europe. As a result of that, I'm afraid, a pattern that we have seen developing all too often |
| 1:02.0 | over the summer, and that is that flights get later and later and later. And then eventually |
| 1:07.9 | late on, and in many cases is very late on, the airline says, |
| 1:13.2 | sorry, we're not going to be able to do this crew running out of hours. |
| 1:16.6 | Sometimes it's the airport closing, but loads of people stranded. |
| 1:22.0 | So we did see very large-scale problems. |
| 1:25.2 | So main problem, I would say, was at Gatwick Airport where British Airways |
| 1:31.0 | cancelled. I calculate 36 flights on Thursday. That means 5,000 passengers at least. Again, many of |
| 1:40.0 | them act at short notice. Many times the passengers told, do not, we can't get you a hotel |
| 1:48.4 | and you're going to have to organise one yourself. If you can, if a big airline like EasyJet |
| 1:55.5 | cannot source hotel rooms on a day when it knows that things are going to be a bit wobbly, |
| 2:00.4 | well, what chance |
| 2:02.0 | does the poor old passenger have? It's awful, I'm afraid. The situation here, we saw more |
| 2:10.1 | cancellations today on EasyJet, flights to Edinburgh, Faroe. That's a really key one for people |
| 2:16.4 | coming back from their holidays. Milan, |
| 2:19.2 | Nantes and Valencia. They are not, and I think that number is going to increase. I've just |
| 2:25.4 | caught wind of flight from Aberdeen on Eastonjet, also being cancelled. But that is |
| 2:30.9 | a small number compared with what British Airways is doing. |
| 2:35.0 | Friday cancellations from Heathrow, three trips to Rome and back, |
... |
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