The clouds are lifting for travel and aviation as it looks forward to the first half-term for two years free of most Covid shackles. Bookings have boomed since the decision that travel testing would end – and easyJet, the airline that carries the most UK passengers, has just welcomed staff who were working remotely back to the Luton hangar that serves as head office.
If optimism is growing that business could return to pre-pandemic levels by summer, easyJet’s chief executive, Johan Lundgren, is clear that the crisis is not yet done.
Short-haul and leisure travel, easyJet’s market, will come back quickest, he says – but this is only the recovery phase of the pandemic after a long time in survival mode. “You have to remind yourself that we were grounded for 11 weeks and didn’t know when we would restart operations.”
Asked whether we will see more variants, he says: “I’m sure we will. I don’t think we can call it over.”
But he certainly believes that testing should be a thing of the past. Having had to track diverging Covid policy across Europe over two years, he says: “It’s been extraordinary sometimes.”
Between the EU’s introduction of digital Covid passports last May and the onset of the Omicron variant, for example, he says, most European countries were open to vaccinated travellers: “No testing, no quarantine. The UK was the only country that had these restrictions – and the scientists and experts are [all] looking at the same data. And the UK had some of the highest rates of infections and cases.
“So one has to be clear that testing on travel is an extraordinarily inefficient measure to combat the virus. That experiment has now been done. It doesn’t work.”
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CV
Age 55
Family Married with twins, a boy and girl, now at university: “They came together, and they left together.”
Education Left school in Sweden at 16 to study classical trombone; business development courses in Stockholm and Lausanne; and a series of mentors – “getting people I can learn a lot from to share thoughts and experiences”.
Pay £740,000 including bonuses; no bonus taken since 2019.
Last holiday Skiing in France’s Les Trois Vallées over Christmas.
Best advice he’s been given “Surround yourself with quality people.”
Biggest career mistake “As president of a company in Canada, I made a big change to its distribution strategy, implementing it overnight despite people telling me not to. That failed spectacularly. You learn to listen to people.”
Word he overuses “My wife would say, ‘Have you done…?’”
How he relaxes “With my wife, reading books” (currently essays by Christopher Hitchens).
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As a Swede, he says he finds the UK’s confrontational politics “fascinating”, and a factor in what he sees as misguided policy: “I think the government thought that people liked the idea of controlling strong borders. But there was no evidence that it was effective. I don’t know why the government has been so keen in going against what almost all other countries were doing in Europe – I think most of Europe got it right.”
Lundgren first came to live in the UK aged 16, following a very different flight path. From the age of 11, the young Johan had only one goal in mind: to become a trombone soloist. “My mother was one of those people who would have said ‘absolutely’ if I’d told her I wanted to be an astronaut,” Lundgren says, “so it probably sounded reasonable.”
After leaving school in Stockholm to train for three years with the leading lights of symphony orchestras in London and then the US, he realised he wasn’t going to hit the level he wanted – a “traumatic” realisation, he confesses. “I was so determined to be successful. I wanted to do it so badly.” He sold his trombones and didn’t touch the instrument again for many years.
Instead, he took stock, decided he liked people and holidays, and headed off to join the travel business: starting as a guide for coach tours to the old Soviet Union, drawing on his knowledge of Rimsky-Korsakov and Rachmaninoff.
After the Russian chill, he leapt at a posting to Cyprus. This was the start of a career in sunshine holidays for European firms: he became second-in-command at Tui before landing at easyJet at the end of 2017.
Lundgren set about boosting easyJet’s holiday arm and planning to make it a more data-focused airline. Two years later, the pandemic hit – and for a while Lundgren’s only focus was on how to stop haemorrhaging cash and keep going. The fleet was grounded at first, and then schedules were upended by changing rules and uncertain demand. Many staff were let go, although agreements with unions minimised compulsory redundancies, he says.
The airline has been rehiring those who took voluntary severance, prioritising former pilots and crew as jobs return, if only seasonally. Many staff were also furloughed, while those who remained “worked harder than they have ever worked in their entire life,” he says.
While aviation was battered by Covid, the industry has even more intractable issues to face. After the pandemic, the biggest change will be the focus on decarbonisation, Lundgren says. “People will pay much more attention to products and services, and companies they buy from. They’ll choose those that reduce their impact on the environment. That’s a conscious choice.”
For that reason, easyJet became the first airline to say it would offset emissions from all its flights – about 8m tonnes – at a price Lundgren refuses to divulge, but insists, in the face of some scepticism, that it is the highest standard. “We have had many people trying to work out if the project has flaws in it – and that’s not the case.”
He admits offsetting is not a solution, but argues that electric and hydrogen planes for short-haul airlines are coming sooner than we think: “The change is exponential, not linear. Airbus have said they will have a large-scale hydrogen plane out by 2035. On the electric side, our partner [US startup Wright Electric] said it will have a 100-plus seater electric plane out by 2030.
“It’s not a question this will happen; it’s when, and how do you then transition? We have a fleet today of 322 aircraft – we need a plan and a roadmap.”
That needs government help across Europe to support the transition, and incentivise greener practices, he argues: “It should be easier and cheaper for you to move into new technology. We’re getting no tax credits today, for example, for our high-quality offsetting programme, while we know there’s not going to be a country by 2050 which won’t rely on offsetting in terms of reaching net zero themselves.”
Wouldn’t it be better for people to take trains rather than planes? “The high-speed rail network in Europe isn’t as developed as some people might think it is. Massive investment in rail infrastructure would mean you would take the carbon hit now – these things have huge carbon emissions – and by the time they’d be ready you’d see new technology in aviation. The focus should be on how you decarbonise the industry; the question should not be if you should stop flying.”
Well, why not? Lundgren’s imposing frame stiffens slightly, his voice rises and the blue eyes stare a little harder as he says: “Because of the millions and millions and millions of people who benefit – economies that benefit, that have an impact in real people’s life.”
Climate change will surely have a bigger impact, though? “You shouldn’t reduce those benefits: you should reduce the impact on the environment. I get extraordinarily upset when people are intellectually lazy, and say we should just stop flying. You keep the benefits and reduce the impacts – just like many other industries.”
More than 200 well-funded projects are looking at electric flight, and easyJet has been involved since 2015, he says: “This is an industry in itself, and one that’s going to be very profitable – we need to raise our voice to accelerate it as soon as possible.
“I feel very strongly – we’ve done our job at easyJet on this whole thing. We see the challenge, but also a way out of it.”
