With the ongoing easing of travel restrictions within Europe and beyond, Airports Council International (ACI) Europe has warned that passengers travelling through Europe’s airports over the summer are at risk of having to spend hours in airport queues due to COVID-19 checks.
Although still well below pre-pandemic traffic levels (2019), passenger traffic is set to increase nearly three-fold from 47 million passengers this month to 125 million passengers in August. Managing such an increase will amount to an unprecedented operational challenge due to the unique combination of space constrained facilities and more peaks in traffic, as well as multiple and diverse COVID-19 checks,
“Airports are desperate to see their facilities coming back to life,” said Olivier Jankovec, Director General of ACI Europe. “But the level of both uncertainty and complexity in planning for the restart is just mind blowing now. With each passing day, the prospect of travellers enduring widespread chaos at airports this summer is becoming more real. We absolutely and urgently need governments to step up advance planning on the full range of issues involved – and work more closely with airports and airlines,” he added.
According to ACI, airlines’ current plans are pointing to air traffic being very much concentrated on peak periods this summer – more than last year or even more than in summer 2019 at some airports. With traffic peaks are a usual feature of airport operations driven by airline scheduling, airport facilities are designed to efficiently accommodate the large passenger volumes. However, that becomes extremely challenging when capacity is reduced as a result of physical distancing and when seamless operational processes are no longer possible due to additional COVID-19 checks.
The additional checks at airports to verify COVID-19 test certificates, passenger locator forms and quarantine documentation are performed by public authorities, airlines and/ or ground handling companies. They are being carried out at multiple times both at departure and on arrival, most of the time manually, resulting in inefficiencies and considerably slowing passenger processing time. For example, checks on COVID-19 tests upon departure are currently duplicated or even triplicated at 77% of Europe’s airports.
In addition the implementation of physical distancing through all airport processes has resulted in constrained space across terminals – severely reducing available physical capacity and increasing passenger processing times. These operational impacts are felt particularly during peak times.
ACI Europe is urging European Governments to: Adopt and implement in a uniformed manner the proposed revised EU Council Recommendation for travel within the EU; Ensure that they will be ready to issue common and interoperable EU digital COVID-19 certificates by 1 July at the latest and that, together with the European Commission, they recognise both digital and manual COVID-19 certificates issued by EU neighbouring countries as well as other third countries which are easing travel restrictions within Europe; Ensure that COVID-19 checks are not duplicated during the travel journey and that these checks are carried out as early in the passenger process as possible.
The airport association is also calling for the deployment of adequate state resources (staff) at airports to ensure that manual checks and border control proceses to do not delay travellers. And it is calling on EASA and ECDC to reconsider physical distancing requirements at airports based on the evolution of the epidemiological situation and the fact that an increasing proportion of travellers will be fully vaccinated.
