At the height of the summer season, the situation at airports is complex and many flights have been cancelled. The travel intelligence platform, Mabrian, analyzed the scheduling data of major European airlines over the past few weeks. Their goal is to assess the impact of the operational challenges faced by many of them.
The organization has compared how many flights were scheduled on June 14 to operate between July 1 and 15, compared to flights scheduled for the same period as of June 28. The results show that Easyjet and Turkish Airlines have been the most affected. The former because of the total number of flights in Europe cancelled, 1,394. The second, because it has the highest number of cancellations as a percentage of its total number of flights, with a figure of almost 7%.
Experts point out that it is very unusual to see airlines cancel scheduled flights at such short notice. Especially when this occurs literally weeks before take-off, right at the peak of the summer season. Just by looking at the top ten cancellations based on this data it is clear that over 2,000 flights in Europe were cancelled during the period of July 1-15 alone.
Experts have never seen anything like this before. It is believed that the crisis is just a reflection of the labor difficulties that airlines and airports are having right now. The airports and airlines operators are unable to return to 2019 capacity levels.
In fact, it’s important to keep some perspective on this overall situation, because when we look at the overall numbers in terms of percentage of an airline's air capacity, what we see is that in many cases the cancellations in relative terms are very low.
The lowest cancelation rate of the top 10 is Air Europa, with less than 0.5% of flights cancelled, meaning that 199 out of 200 are still scheduled to fly. However, every cancellation represents a holiday nightmare for someone and a loss of revenue for the airline: no one wins here and it is clear that the industry is a long way from solving the problem.
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How does it work, you ask?
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