EasyJet hit by wave of staff sickness as pressure grows on travel industry

EasyJet has said an unprecedented wave of staff sickness has led to flight cancellations as the UK airline industry struggles to cope with a surge in demand that the low-cost carrier expects will increase in the coming months.

The airline on Tuesday said there had been a “strong and sustained” recovery since the UK government lifted all travel restrictions in late January, with leisure bookings for the summer holidays soaring ahead of 2019 levels over the past six weeks.

The rapid recovery follows two bruising years and has left carriers across Europe scrambling to restore flight schedules as they struggle to meet the growing demand for flying amid chronic staff shortages, caused by cost cuts during the pandemic and a new wave of Covid-19 infections.

British Airways has cancelled scores of flights, while passengers at Manchester airport have been forced to queue for hours to get through security, and Heathrow this week said 12,000 new staff were needed across the airport.

EasyJet has been one of the worst-hit airlines and has been forced to cancel hundreds of flights in recent weeks following a coronavirus outbreak among staff.

The airline has cancelled 5 per cent of its flights over recent days, including 58 out of 1,500 flights on Tuesday.

The airline typically plans for 6 per cent of staff to be off sick at any one time, and can handle about double this before it needs to start cancelling flights.

But some bases had been hit by as much as 20 per cent of its staff off work, making it impossible to run flights as planned, said easyJet’s chief executive Johan Lundgren.

The cancellations have been made well in advance and most passengers have been rebooked to fly on the same day.

Lundgren said it was the airline’s “absolute focus” to operate with as little disruption as possible in the coming weeks, but warned that absence rates had not started improving yet.

The operational disruptions come as easyJet ramps up its flying schedules. It flew 80 per cent of its 2019 number of seats in March, and expects to increase this to 90 per cent in the current quarter, which runs from April to June.

The airline said this would rise to “near” pre-pandemic levels for the following three months, which are the peak summer period for the travel industry.

The airline said it expected to post a pre-tax loss of between £535mn and £565mn for the six months to the end of March, down from a loss of £701mn the previous year.

A total of 11.5mn passengers flew on an easyJet flight in the first three months of this year, up from just 1.2mn the year previously and outperforming expectations.

EasyJet said pricing “remained competitive” during the winter and it expected to report revenue of about £1.5bn for the six months to the end of the month, the first half of its financial year, up from £240mn in the previous year.

Analysts at Goodbody said the update from easyJet was “as good as we might have hoped” and forecast the airline would return to a small profit in the full year.

The company is 64 per cent hedged for fuel in the second half of its financial year at about $571 a metric tonne, a little more than half the current spot price, shielding it from the worst impact of soaring oil prices.