Travellers should get automatic reimbursement for cancelled foreign holidays like the delay repay scheme for trains, the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, has said.
Shapps ruled out sending in the armed forces to help process holidaymakers after scenes of travel chaos over the half-term break, saying it was up to airlines and airports themselves to hire and train more staff. He said there should be a campaign “to attract people to the sector and make sure that people are properly paid”.
The transport secretary said he wanted there to be a scheme for people to get quick refunds, like the national scheme that train companies use to compensate passengers for delays.
Asked if the army would be brought in if things did not improve over the next few weeks, Shapps said: “The army is not a snap solution to every problem. Secondly, they are being deployed in increasing numbers to eastern Europe, to the Baltics, in what is a war situation and that’s what the army are principally there for.
“The airports and airlines will need to sort out this problem. The government will give them every support, but I don’t anticipate that will include calling in the army.”
Speaking to the BBC’s Sunday Morning programme, Shapps said further changes were coming to try to avoid similar scenes for the summer holidays.
“Having accepted it is a private sector industry, we’ll of course do absolutely everything possible to make sure that we are helping people get away this summer,” he said. “To make sure that, where that doesn’t happen, there is proper disputes resolution, proper charter for passengers, to make sure it means they can get quick, straightforward compensation for it or be put on other flights.
“Because it can’t be acceptable that it is so complicated sometimes to get a flight rearranged or to get your money back. I want it to be more like delay repay works on trains, where it is an automated process.”
He said that it was now imperative that airlines did not oversell flights, which had caused some passengers to have their entire holidays cancelled. “It is very important that flights aren’t oversold, for example, and I want to make sure there is automatic compensation for passengers,” he said.
“We’ll work with the industry very hard between now and the summer to make sure we don’t see a repeat of those scenes. Clearly, they have been taken by surprise by the way people have returned to travel after two years of being locked down, but I’m not surprised – we were saying all along: ‘You will need to be ready for this.’”
