The pandemic caused flight cancellations worldwide during the Christmas holiday due to high sick leave among staff.
Now Jacob Pedersen, aviation analyst at Sydbank, sees that the omicron is also starting to have an effect on travel demand.
”It will be a big problem for the airlines,” he says.
According to Jacob Pedersen, it was mainly illness among pilots and cabin crew that caused canceled flights during the Christmas holidays.
”"It can be very difficult to bring in new staff in a short time and airlines don't have large amounts of extra employee capacity right now, they simply can't afford it," he says.
At the same time, travel is high during Christmas and SAS has had up to 600 flights a day. However, in the days before Christmas, the company had to cancel around 60 flights due to high sick leave. From Christmas Eve onwards, things have looked better with only five cancelled flights from Arlanda, according to Freja Annamatz, press manager at SAS.
”"It is important to emphasize that all passengers affected have been rebooked on other flights with us or other companies," she says.
Jacob Pedersen says that the spread of the infection will continue to affect airlines going forward.
”"It is not related to corona among staff, but is primarily due to travel restrictions and lower demand for travel among passengers."”
In mid-November, travel in Denmark was around 15 percent lower than in 2019, according to the analyst. But now he sees that searches for travel on booking sites have decreased to a level around 35-40 percent below 2019 levels.
”"We have seen a steep drop. It's not the exact percentages, but the trend is the same in Sweden and Denmark."”
”"It will be a big problem for airlines because they had planned for a gradual improvement in traffic over the winter months and continuing into the summer. That improvement has been stopped by travel restrictions and the coronavirus."”
However, Freja Annamatz says that it is too early to know how travel will be affected during the winter.
”There is concern related to the development of omicron. We see that when you introduce travel restrictions, demand is greatly affected. But it remains to be seen how big the effect will be. During the pandemic, we have seen that when uncertainty increases, booking behavior changes to booking more frequently.”
Norwegian has not had to cancel flights over Christmas, says the company's communications director Grete Kruse Roald. Like SAS, they have had good bookings so far and are also seeing people booking their flights closer together. The company has reduced capacity for the winter and will continue with further capacity adjustments for January and February due to omicron.
”"Winter is the low season for us and there are fewer people traveling, especially in January and February. We see that bookings have decreased a bit, but at the same time those who are traveling are booking close to the time," says Grete Kruse Roald.
”"It's not possible" to say exactly what the bookings in January and February will be like before we get there.”
When the pandemic broke out, the EU dropped the requirement that airlines must use at least 80 percent of their slots to keep their slots for the coming year. But this year they have reintroduced a 50 percent requirement that will apply until the end of March.
Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr said before the Christmas holidays that the German company will make 18,000 unnecessary flights during the winter to maintain its schedules, in an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine.
Freja Annamatz says she hopes SAS will not have to fly half-empty planes to meet the requirement.
”We haven’t had to do that yet and hope we won’t have to in the future.”
Source: di.se
