It will take until the end of 2023 to get global travel back to pre-pandemic level, the chief executive of London Heathrow Airport.
John Holland-Kaye said,”It will take until the end of this year in total before global aviation gets back prepandemic, and that’s a question of recruiting people, training them up and building in resilience.”
He said globally, about 20% fewer people are working in aviation compared with before the pandemic.
Heathrow said it lost about 25,000 workers at the height of the pandemic, Holland-Kaye said. It has hired back 16,000.
He said, “Volume-wise that’s a massive recruitment exercise in the space of about nine months.”
He said another hurdle was that airlines and airports haven’t spent what they normally would during the two years of near-hibernation on facilities and maintenance.
“When everyone is conserving cash for two years,” there is far less spending for maintaining facilities, he said. He used escalators as an example.
“There will be a legacy of that over the next couple of years as airports and airlines catch up,” he said.
