To be confused about airlines

[zoedoodle]

How can they complain about a 14-day quarantine and say it’s ruining their business when only essential travel is allowed anyway?

You only need to look at what’s happened in New Zealand (covid-free for two weeks until two British people brought it back in) to see that it’s a total no brainer, and it’s not like anyone is going on holiday anyway.

I read an article where the guy from EasyJet said quarantines put people off travelling early in the pandemic - are these people on glue, do they actually think that’s why people travelled less?

And they claim planes are safe, and refuse to have an empty middle seat, just because that’s what’s more convenient. I don’t get it. Why are they so entitled?

DH works in an industry that is completely closed for the foreseeable and they wouldn’t try to pull this kind of crap so why is it ok for the airlines?

[MereDintofPandiculation]

Why are they so entitled? They're running a business with high overheads which depends on filling planes. Losing holiday makers, or weekend breaks (who is going to fly for a weekend break if there's two weeks quarantine on return?) or reducing their capacity by a third is going to affect their viability.

[zoedoodle]

But nobody can go on holiday anyway?!

[SoupDragon]

No one can go to restaurants either but that doesn't stop them saying that the 2m distancing rule would ruin them.

[SoupDragon]

They are just simple facts, surely.

[amicissimma]

There's no conclusive evidence about planes being safe or not. There's an interesting article in The Lancet about Germany's Patient Zero.

Patient Zero flew back to China from Germany with Covid symptoms, having spread it in Germany. Patient 12 flew to Tenerife, presumably asymptomatic. No cases were found (by May) from the other people who'd been on their flights and I would think that the Chinese authorities, in particular, would be very thorough about tracing and testing by the end of January.

[GaspingGekko]

We are considering flying to the UK over the summer. The quarantine would make it practically pointless though. So yes putting a quarantine in place will impact the numbers of people flying.

A quarantine period should have been put in place early on, I'm shocked the UK didn't do it. Now I would be coming from a country with a significantly lower level of Covid than the UK but still expected to quarantine. I honestly don't understand the logic of doing it now.

[nomorefencepostsplease]

Well, people don't just use planes to go on holiday. They may travel for work or to visit family.

It may be the case that essential travel is all that is allowed in the UK but that isn't the case elsewhere.

We live in France. MIL is in UK. She is in her 90s and lives alone.
We would like to go and visit her. To do this we would book a return flight BUT the UK quarantine regulations make it impossible for us to do this - so whichever airline we would use is losing out on our business. It's not hard to see why they are objecting to the quarantine.