The pandemic induced lockdowns across the world had caused a major setback to the travel and aviation industry. With the countries closing their borders to prevent the spread of Covid-19 virus, the airlines had to suffer significant losses. However, as the pandemic situation has improved across the world, international travels have seen a sudden surge.
Amid the ongoing travel chaos around the world, and especially in Europe, due to increased traffic and extreme shortage of staff, the CEO of Qatar Airways Akbar Al Baker hit out at the work from home culture and held it responsible for the current situation.
Speaking to Reuters at the UK’s Farnborough International Airshow this week, he said that the work from home is an epidemic in the aviation industry. “This all happened because people learned to get easy money from working out of their homes, and fewer people now want to come and do the jobs that they were doing,” Al Baker told Reuters.
Airline unions, on the other hand, have different reasons to blame for this mayhem. As per the Fortune magazine, the airline unions like UK’s Unite, attribute the travel congestion to staff layoffs and pay cuts, which happened during the disruptions caused by Covid-19 pandemic.
These comments by Al Baker have come at a time when London’s Heathrow Airport has taken the decision to curb the passenger traffic in order to contain the travel mess. The international travel demand has surged to the pre-pandemic levels, but the aviation sector is still facing a dearth of staff.
London’s Heathrow Airport, the largest in the UK and one of the busiest airports in the world, recently announced plans to curb the number of passengers to 1,00,000 per day till September.
In an interview with Bloomberg at the airshow, recently, Akbar Al Baker questioned the Heathrow Airport management’s foresight regarding the crisis and said that they should have seen it coming. He suggested that Heathrow Airport authorities should have taken mitigating measures in advance.
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