Yahoo Finance EasyJet urges UK to extend green list as it increases flights to 60% of pre-Covid levels
The easyJet boss has called on the UK government to add “many more” European countries to its “green” quarantine-free travel list, as the airline announced it was ramping up the number of flights it operates to 60% of pre-pandemic levels during the summer holiday season.
The airline will operate up to 1,400 flights a day between July and September. On Monday, it ran 1,000 flights.
EasyJet also revealed that fewer than half of its UK summer flights were sold, compared with 69% at this point in 2019, and that two-thirds of its bookings had come from mainland Europe. Normally, its business is split 50-50 between the UK and the rest of Europe.
Johan Lundgren, the chief executive, said the UK was falling behind the rest of Europe, and criticised the UK government’s different approach to opening up international travel compared with opening up the economy.
Lundgren called on the government to add many more European countries to its green quarantine-free travel list, reflecting lower Covid infection levels, and to drop testing requirements for those destinations.
“The fact that you can go into a very crowded nightclub, with no face mask, no vaccination and no testing, but you cannot fly and lie on a beach in a low-risk destination that has proven much lower cases of infection levels than the UK and you will be [subject to] different kinds of unnecessary expensive testing and requirements, that just doesn’t make sense,” he said.
Watch: Coronavirus - Countries on the UK green list
Lundgren added that the UK was moving in the right direction on opening up travel. “The next step will be … that many many more destinations in Europe should go on the green list and green should be green,” he said. “Unnecessary testing should not be in place because it does restrict travel for millions of passengers in a way that is unfair and not backed up by science.”
Lundgren also urged the government to keep its promise to reduce the cost of testing, by removing VAT. PCR tests typically cost between £50 and £250, much more than in other European countries. He said expensive PCR tests could be replaced by two lateral flow tests, which were cheaper, and noted that in some other countries, such as France, the government pays for travellers’ tests.
In the three months to the end of June, EasyJet operated 17% flights compared with the same period in 2019, a total of 24,682, slightly less than planned, and carried 3 million passengers. It made revenues of £212m, up from £7.2m a year earlier when its fleet was fully grounded for all but two weeks of the quarter. Its loss before tax fell by 8.2% to £318m.
After the UK announced the waiving of the quarantine requirement for fully vaccinated passengers returning from amber list countries on 8 July, bookings surged by 400% on the previous week. This prompted easyJet to increase capacity on 74 routes from the UK to amber countries such as Spain, Greece, Portugal and Cyprus.
When Malta and Madeira were added to the UK’s green list of countries that do not require travellers to quarantine upon their return, easyJet put 60,000 additional seats on sale and launched two new routes, from Bristol and Luton to Malta. Lundgren said Croatia, Malta, the Balearics and Greece were popular destinations this summer.
Watch: Airline refunds - What are your rights as a consumer?'
EasyJet has also launched 12 new UK domestic routes to plug the gap left by the failure of Stobart Air in June, and said demand was strong.
At the same time, the carrier has shifted towards its European bases, adding more seats to routes from Berlin to Faro and Lisbon, from Amsterdam to Tenerife, Palma de Mallorca and Málaga, and from Paris to Corsica .
EasyJet has also launched eight routes from its EU and Swiss bases to Greece that were previously operating from the UK.
After reducing the size of its fleet by 10% and cutting other costs, easyJet burned through £34m of cash every week on average in the last quarter, better than the £40m a week target given in April.
The company paid a further £122m in refunds to customers whose flights were cancelled due to the pandemic, bringing the total to £1.2bn since the start of the pandemic. It has also issued vouchers worth £230m.
EasyJet does not expect travel to recover to 2019 levels until 2023.
