What’s going on with TUI / Easyjet flights?

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Literally 100’s being cancelled over half term.

we have a holiday booked in august, flying with Easyjet. I am seriously worried about this now.

why is this happening so suddenly? Makes no sense when the travel industry has been in such a bad place and this is the opportunity for it to get back up and running?

I’m guessing it’s about staffing. People moved away from travel industry during covid and a lot of industries are struggling to recruit. When we flew earlier in the year Tui was having trouble as still problems with staff off due to covid - air staff presumably have to test depending on which country they are flying to. I feel very sorry for anyone whose holiday was cancelled last minute like that.

Not enough staff.

Lack of staff. Lots were laid off during covid and found other employment.

There was some kind of enormous computer problem earlier in the week - not sure if that has had a knock on effect (planes & crew all in the wrong place probably takes days to sort out)

I didn’t think of that, makes sense though. I hear that TUI are overbooking flights - which is disgraceful if they know they cannot honour the bookings.

Easyjet (and many other airlines) made a ton of their staff redundant during covid, those staff have either found jobs elsewhere (either with other airlines or they have left the airline industry altogether).. `

That has now come back to bite them as the industry has bounced back but they just don't have the crew and it takes time to recruit and train.

Couple that with the cost of living crisis and cabin crew aren't known to be making huge amounts of money has lead to people who potentially would've considered it as a career to consider something different

If they've been struggling to recruit, then why have they been taking people's money promising flights that they can't fulfil?

Sure they can offer a refund, but it messes up bookings with hotels etc.

I’m rather concerned too. We had our flights cancelled by Easyjet at Easter and rebooked for end of June.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s cancelled again.
OP hope your holiday in August goes ahead ok.

It's training staff that's the problem. Airlines have not been flying very much and pilots have been furloughed. So pilots need extensive training to go back to flying but until there were flights to train them, they could only do so much in the SIMs.

Now there are the flights, they can train their pilots but the capacity of training captains etc., is only so much.

TUI have also been recruiting new pilots to cover the summer. Once these pilots have been trained, the situation will stabilise.

@Tornado70 Thank you, I really hope that your flights go ahead as planned.

Overbooking is not new.

This is incorrect. TUI do not overbook flights

A lot of TUI pilots used to do flights out of other countries over winter, pre-covid. Those crews have been lost, so they need to train them up again.
There was a rumour started on MN earlier this week that TUI we’re going bust, but if you look at the shares, they are doing well. So don’t believe everything you read on MN.

Try not to worry too much OP. I’m just home after a holiday with TUI. No issues although our flight was chartered with BA instead of tui

DD was due to fly to Spain with EasyJet this morning. Flight cancelled, only found out when they got to the airport, no holiday. It’s a shit time to travel anywhere at the moment.

There's probably people who have holidays to take that have been rescheduled due to covid.

Plus the people who've had vouchers to use up (we have an Easyjet voucher that we have to use soon, that's the result of two separate cancelled flight bookings, firstly from November 2020, cancelled, rebooked for August 2021, cancelled, haven't got round to rebooking).

Plus the people booking for this summer who might have booked months ago, the airlines probably hoped/planned that they'd have sufficient trained crew in place by now, but they're still reporting high levels of sickness.

Plus maybe Brexit related fallout - EU nationals returning to home countries.

Due to go to Orlando on Wednesday with Tui 🤣🤣😩

Hospitality staff. Similar issues is the UK TBF

Overbooking refers to the practice of booking more people on flights than there are seats for on the assumption that some people won't turn up. The flight still goes on.

These are entire flights we're talking about

All perfectly good reasons, but people can only book flights that are shown as available. If they haven’t got the staff to cover 1400 flights a day or whatever the figure is, those flights should not be available to book, whatever the reason for the booking.

The other issue is how long its taking to get airside passes for staff, the clearance checks are taking ages.

BA have cancelled 140 flights today.