Jet2 pushes restart date back to June 24th after traffic light announcement
Jet2 holidays has pushed back its restart date by more than a month to June 24th in response to publication of the UK Travel Taskforce report which the tour operator says “doesn’t give us anything.” Speaking on a travel webcast after the report was published, chief executive Steve Heapy confirmed the change, saying that the aim to restart in May was “not fair on customers, travel agents and staff.”
Heapy said: “My initial reaction is disappointment, to be honest. After five weeks of the Global Travel Taskforce putting together the report they’ve come up with something that isn’t an awful lot different in structure to that we had in place last summer. They’ve committed to looking at cheaper tests but there’s no real detail.”
“We are trying to run an airline, and we don’t know when we can start flying, where we can start flying to, and the conditions under which we are operating.” Heapy said Jet2 wasn’t expecting the traffic list destinations to be published, but wanted to see more detail in the taskforce’s report.
He explained that to resume on May 17th, as previously planned: “We’d have to recruit loads of seasonal staff in the UK, loads of seasonal staff in every one of the 50-odd destinations we fly to, and we might not be flying there for two or three months.
“We’d have the cost base of a fully operational airline and potentially not flying. It’s just not sustainable.” He stressed: “I’m very disappointed in what’s in there. It doesn’t really give us anything.”
Heapy said that the taskforce publishing the green list in ‘early May’, as it intends to, was “not enough notice” for a May 17th restart. All things considered, he confirmed that: “It’s with a heavy heart that I’m pushing the restart date back, to June 24th. There’s too much uncertainty. It’s not fair on our travel agent colleagues who are having to field queries from customers saying ‘what’s happening?’ It’s not fair on customers, and it’s not fair on staff.”
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“People can handle good news and people can handle bad news but the killer, very often, is uncertainty. And there’s just uncertainty everywhere.”
Heapy said he doesn’t expect many places to be open from May 17th, and predicted the government would try to open up “glory routes”, such as “Heathrow, Singapore, etc” at the expense of holiday destinations from smaller airports. “What we want is routes that ordinary people want, not the business routes,” he concluded.