Heathrow introduces passenger cap for first time to avert disruption

London’s Heathrow airport has introduced a daily limit on the number of passengers for the first time and told airlines to stop selling tickets over the next two months in an attempt to avert more summer travel disruption.

The UK’s busiest airport said no more than 100,000 people would be able to fly each day on departures from the airport until September 11, or passengers would face more long waits and last-minute cancellations.

The airport, which handled 125,000 departing passengers a day before the pandemic, has been affected by staff shortages in its own security as well as among airlines and ground handlers, forcing it to cap traveller numbers.

“We are asking our airline partners to stop selling summer tickets to limit the impact on passengers,” said chief executive John Holland-Kaye on Tuesday.

Heathrow has an average of 104,000 daily departing seats under its current schedule this summer, which means it will have to cut hundreds of flights.

Of the 4,000 excess seats above the 100,000 limit, about 1,500 a day have already been sold to passengers, Heathrow said.

However, at about 10 a day or just over 600 in total facing cancellations, it will only be a fraction of the 70,000 scheduled flights at the airport over the next two months.

Although the majority of passengers travelling this summer will not be hit by the cancellations, airports and airlines are still facing a heavy blow to their reputations as they recover from the pandemic.

Such drastic measures were virtually unheard of before this summer’s travel disruption, but the crisis in staffing across the aviation industry has forced airports to take extreme action.

London Gatwick and Amsterdam Schiphol have already introduced their own caps in response to the staff shortages.

British Airways, the largest airline operating from Heathrow, has cancelled about 30,000 flights this summer in response to its worker shortfall and operational problems at airports.

Other major European airlines including Lufthansa and KLM have also cut some flights and even changed ticket pricing to try to stop new customers from booking.

Holland-Kaye said some “critical functions” were still “significantly under resourced” at Heathrow, particularly ground handlers, which are subcontracted by airlines and typically handle tasks such as check-in and baggage.

“Over the past few weeks, as departing passenger numbers have regularly exceeded 100,000 a day, we have started to see periods when service drops to a level that is not acceptable,” Holland-Kaye added, pointing to problems including long wait times, bags not travelling with passengers and last-minute cancellations.

Holland-Kaye said the airport had been forced to impose the cap because not enough airlines had cut flights despite encouragement from the government to trim their schedules early to avoid the last-minute disruption at many UK airports in late spring.

Working out the likely number of cancellations at Heathrow over the next two months, industry executives have assumed about 150 people per aircraft, which on rough calculations would mean about 10 flights being cancelled a day and 620 in total.