With an extra-long weekend for the Jubilee, and half-term for thousands of kids across the UK, many families are taking advantage and setting off on their first foreign holiday for two years. And the great escape will continue through the year, as research by American Express shows that this summer is set to be a bumper year for travel, with £40bn expected to be spent (up from £4.9bn last year).
But is the country ready? Not if the emerging scenes of bedlam in the biggest airports in Britain continues, as pictures of long queues at airports, people sleeping on floors, and hundreds of cancelled flights circulate across social media. I spoke to Hilary Osborne, the Guardian’s money and consumer editor, about why this is happening – and whether anything will improve in time for summer. If you’ve got a holiday booked, you may want to keep reading. First though, the headlines.
Five big stories
Politics | Boris Johnson and his allies have launched an emergency effort to lobby wavering MPs as he faces the spiralling threat of a confidence vote in his leadership. By Tuesday night, at least 44 Tory MPs had publicly questioned Johnson’s fitness to hold office.
Ukraine | Russian forces have taken control of most of the city of Sievierodonetsk in eastern Ukraine, the governor of Ukraine’s Luhansk province said, as civilians were told to stay underground. He said that while Russia had not surrounded the key city “fierce street fighting” was underway.
NHS | Criminal acts of violence at GP surgeries across the UK have almost doubled in five years, new figures reveal, as doctors’ leaders warn of a perfect storm of soaring demand and staff shortages.
Immigration | The Home Office cancelled a chartered deportation flight to Iraq that was due to depart from the UK on Tuesday evening. Up to 30 Kurdish asylum seekers were facing deportation in the first flight of its kind for a decade.
Culture | Bradford, one of the most diverse places in the UK, has been named the 2025 city of culture, a prestigious accolade that attracts thousands of tourists and guarantees millions of pounds of funding and investment.
In depth: Shouldn’t someone have seen this coming?
Over two million people are supposed to fly abroad over the bank holiday weekend. It’s a huge increase on the past couple of Covid-hit years, and airports across the country are facing significant disruption. People are being told to wait for hours at a time for flights that are increasingly getting cancelled. Why? Inflation, Brexit, the ripple effects of Covid: “I hate using this expression, but it really is a perfect storm,” Hilary says.
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Why is this happening?
To understand what’s going on now, we should cast our minds back to 2020, when travel abroad was more or less completely halted. There were almost a million fewer flights in 2021 than 2019. The pandemic froze the global aviation industry, and despite the government funnelling the biggest companies money to help keep them afloat, it wasn’t enough: tens of thousands of jobs were cut. “The industry took an absolute hammering during the first lockdown,” Hilary explains. “They cut back their workforce, they weren’t putting any money in, they decided to just batten down the hatches.”
Everything was dependent on how the pandemic would turn out, so it wasn’t clear when things would get better for the travel industry and when they needed to gear up their operations again. With hindsight, it may seem obvious that when the world opened up again there would be this level of demand – a government official told the Times that this was “a wholly foreseeable surge” that airlines should’ve been prepared for – but Hilary points out that “we’ve had false starts. You can’t really blame them for holding back.”
But after a robust vaccination campaign, loosening border restrictions and no sign of a more dangerous variant, it looks like things are slowly getting back to some kind of normality, in Britain at least. According to the Financial Times, the number of scheduled flights was at about 89% of 2019 levels last month. After two years of staycations, people are clamouring to go abroad, and airports are struggling to cope with the increased demand. “The infrastructure isn’t back in place, the people aren’t there and of course once you start cancelling flights you’ve got even more people at the airport,” Hilary says, “so it spirals.”
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It’s not just Covid though …
Despite a big recruitment drive, the aviation industry isn’t able to fill roles quickly enough to meet demand. Airlines need countless different jobs to operate – from security guards to cabin crew – but there are widespread staff shortages across much of the economy following the pandemic. Huge numbers of workers are needed in airports and some of the jobs are sensitive, requiring lengthy background checks and training. In their desperation, airlines have reportedly started to relax some of these policies to fill the gaps.
This gap in recruitment in the UK is, of course, exacerbated by Brexit. “The aviation industry traditionally hires a lot of people from Europe,” Paul Charles, CEO of travel PR firm the PC Agency tells me. “But that talent pool has shrunk, because access to the UK has been tightened and there are fewer Europeans who want to work here. And increasing inflation rates means that it costs more to hire people too, the industry is in competition in a squeezed labour market.”
And that’s on top of the fact that many employees were paid to leave by travel firms, so the companies are having to offer incentives to bring them back in. All of these factors lead to further delays, and make travelling for customers more difficult.
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What’s next?
Hilary is cautious of making any big predictions: there are too many moving parts, she says. In the coming weeks, it looks like the disruptions are going to continue. Tui has announced that it’s cancelling more than 180 flights from Manchester until the end of June – and despite all this demand, the global industry is still set to lose $11bn this year. There’s no guarantee a holiday this summer is going to go any smoother than a flight this weekend.
Paul Charles is a little more hopeful, arguing that if the airline industry is able to “get its house in order” before the next holiday peak at the end of July, they’ll be able to mitigate a lot of the disruption. But that’s a big ‘if’. It’s highly unlikely that people will put their holiday plans on hold for a third year, so there’s a good chance the chaos will continue for a while yet.
Magaluf 2023, anyone?
What else we’ve been reading
29,725 people born by egg or sperm donation in the UK before 2005 don’t have the right to know their full parentage. Dorothy Byrne, whose daughter is one of them, writes about why she now agrees with her daughter that it’s wrong “to stop someone knowing who they are”. Archie
Ivan Philippov writes about his changing relationship with his Russian identity after he left Moscow following the invasion of Ukraine. “In my carefully constructed social bubble, there wasn’t a single person who supported the war,” he writes, “we felt like leaves, scattered by a hurricane.” Nimo
The death of independent bookshops at the hands of Amazon has been confidently predicted for more than a decade. Instead, the indies have mounted a quiet comeback. In the New Statesman, Katharine Swindells explains why Amazon surrendered. Archie
It’s the profile we’ve all been waiting for. Sarah Manavis spoke to Avril Lavigne about her early career in the 2000s and how her music has found a new home and new fans on TikTok. Nimo
From the Staircase to the Dropout, there’s a glut of true stories in prestige drama at the moment. Adrian Horton writes persuasively about why that might not be great news: “there is, it turns out, a high bar for overcoming the distracting, basic tension of what really happened versus what’s on screen.” Archie
Sport
Tennis | In what he called a “tough match”, Rafael Nadal beat his old rival Novak Djokovic in the French Open, winning 6-2, 4-6, 6-2, 7-6(4). Nadal will now face Alexander Zverev in the semi-finals.
Football | Liverpool’s chief executive said the club want more details on the scope of the independent report into chaos outside Saturday’s Champions League final.
Football | Want all the latest football news? Why not sign up for our free and funny daily football newsletter, The Fiver, or our weekly women’s football newsletter, Moving the Goalposts.
The front pages
The Guardian splashes today with “Ministers accused of fuelling anger as rise in violence hits GP surgeries”. Wednesday’s Financial Times says “EU-UK pact on insurance ban deals fresh blow to Russian oil exports”. The Mirror has “Archbishop’s jubilee plea: forgive Andrew”, as Justin Welby courts controversy. The Metro’s lead is “Boris may be toast – Tory rebellion grows over partygate”. The Telegraph has “Explain partygate, ethics chief tells PM” while the Times puts it more strongly: “Ethics chief threatens to resign over No 10 parties”. “Rebels without a clue” – the Daily Mail cites a cabinet source as saying Boris Johnson’s Tory detractors are “doing Labour’s bidding”. The i has “PM phoning Tory MPs to save his job”. The Express says “You spent £8bn of our money ‘What’s gone wrong?’” – it reports that holiday chaos comes despite £8bn in government aid for the travel industry. “Landing of hope & glory” – the Sun tells how lightning forced the Queen’s jet to have a second go at landing.
Today in Focus
Is the UK heading for a recession?
Last Friday, Boris Johnson was asked if the UK economy was heading for recession. He replied “not necessarily at all”. Richard Partington explains why we are facing such economic uncertainty
Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
The breakout success of Heartstopper, a new Netflix LGBTQ+ coming-of-age series, is notable in part for the happy ending it grants its characters. Michael Segalov didn’t believe it would happen: “The idea that the show might end as it did – with a tear-jerkingly joyful celebration of young queer love in full bloom, depicted gorgeously – seemed impossible. My own similar experiences at school, I believed, had taught me far better.”
Segalov reports that Heartstopper’s premise is part of a broader trend, presenting “a new generation’s queer experience, the angst and trauma that we’ve become so accustomed to witnessing taking a back seat.”
Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday
Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s crosswords to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android. Until tomorrow.
