UK. Passenger traffic at London Heathrow Airport fell by -95.2% year-on-year in June, to 350,000, as COVID-19 continued to weigh heavily on travel demand. This was an improvement on the figure of 228,000 in May, when traffic fell by -96.6%.
The airport company, which said at the weekend that it would temporarily close its southern runway for repair work, noted that the UK government’s quarantine policy for international arrivals directly hit load factors when it was introduced last month.
“While steps toward travel corridors in July provide some hope for an initial recovery, further pace is needed to move past quarantine,” it said in a statement. “Heathrow urges government to act faster on establishing Common International Standards that would allow safer travel to critical trading routes.
“Heathrow stands ready to host the UK’s first pilot ‘Test-on-Arrival’ procedure from Collinson and Swissport. The pilot, which is subject to government approval, could allow COVID-negative passengers arriving from higher risk countries to enter the UK without the need to quarantine.”
Heathrow CEO John Holland-Kaye said: “Travel corridors were a great first step and now we need to go further to protect jobs and kickstart the economy, by allowing healthy passengers to travel freely between the UK and the rest of the world. We’re ready to pilot a testing system on arrival for passengers from ‘red’ countries as an alternative to quarantine, but even better would be to test passengers before they get on a plane. This requires a Common International Standard for testing, which the UK government could take a global lead in setting up.”
