July 10th - EasyJet axes more departures
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 10 July 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After weeks of last-minute cancellations to and from London Gatwick airport, easyJet has pre-emptively axed 1,700 further departures over the summer. Britain’s biggest budget airline has taken the drastic action in a bid to get its schedule back on track and to reduce the number of flights that get cancelled while passengers are waiting at the gate. The airline blames severe air-traffic control congestion across Europe for its problems. Most passengers have been notified and rebooked on other easyJet flights, but around 9,000 passengers may have to find seats on other airlines.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It is Monday the 10th of July and it's around |
| 0:08.5 | two in the afternoon when I'm recording this in the independent offices where it has been an extremely |
| 0:14.3 | busy morning. That's because it became clear over the weekend that EasyJet was canceling flights in very, very large |
| 0:24.1 | numbers and I've been digging to find out just what it means for your possible trip |
| 0:30.2 | abroad this summer. Just to give you some background, as you will probably know, EasyJet has been |
| 0:37.2 | cancelling an awful lot of flights in and out of its main base gatwick airport for instance over the weekend there were i think about 40 on saturday similar number on sunday passengers who were at gatwick airport on sunday night, for example, waiting for the last Belfast flight, |
| 0:58.5 | found that they waited and waited and waited and then eventually it was cancelled. |
| 1:02.7 | Same happened to a plane load of people waiting in Budapest to get back to Gatwick. |
| 1:09.5 | And effectively, EasyJet says says we are in an impossible position we are the |
| 1:16.1 | biggest airline at Gatwick we have about half the flight in and out we are facing unprecedented |
| 1:24.3 | air traffic control problems in Europe which means that our flights are getting |
| 1:28.5 | more and more delayed. Because there's no slack in the system at Gatwick, once delays start |
| 1:34.3 | building up, they tend just to get worse and worse and we end up having reluctantly to cancel flights. |
| 1:41.5 | So therefore, we have decided to get ahead of the problem. They are canceling 1,700 flights, |
| 1:48.1 | which is just fewer than they do in a busy day in terms of flights overall. But this covers |
| 1:53.8 | basically the rest of July into August and September. It's affecting, they tell me, |
| 2:00.1 | 180,000 passengers. and of those, the large majority, |
| 2:06.2 | have been re-booked on other easy jet flights on the same day. 18,000 people haven't been |
| 2:13.6 | re-booked on the same day, which point they can most definitely ask to be flown on a |
| 2:20.9 | different airline. And 9,000 simply haven't been given any replacement flight, at which point |
| 2:26.9 | they also are entitled to be flown back by the airline to wherever they were going as close to |
| 2:32.7 | the original timing as possible. |
... |
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