The Dubai-based airline on Thursday rejected demands made by London Heathrow Airport earlier this week for the carrier to stop selling more tickets for this summer.
The airline, which operates six flights a day from Heathrow, rejected the new restrictions as “completely unreasonable and unacceptable”.
Heathrow, like other airports, is struggling to cope with recovering passengers after two years of pandemic restrictions and staff cuts. The airport said on Tuesday it would limit the daily number of departing passengers to 100,000 until September 11.
“[London Heathrow] chose not to act, not to plan, not to invest. Now, faced with an ‘airmageddon’ situation due to their incompetence and inaction, they are shifting the entire burden – of the cost and struggle to fix the mess – onto the airlines and passengers,” the airline said in a statement.
The company said Heathrow had given it just 36 hours to comply with the new restriction and threatened legal action against airlines that refused to comply. He added that it has enough ground handling and catering staff to service its flights at the airport.
Emirates said Heathrow’s management team was “impartial to passengers and airline customers” and had failed to re-hire and train enough staff ahead of the expected summer travel surge.
On average, Heathrow handled nearly 220,000 passengers each day, split between arrivals and departures, in 2018.
A Heathrow spokesman told CNN Business that the main cause of flight delays and cancellations was a lack of airline ground handling teams, which he said were only at 70% of pre-pandemic levels.
“For months we have been asking the airlines to help come up with a plan to solve their resource challenges, but no clear plans have been forthcoming and the problem is getting worse every day,” the spokesman said.
Heathrow chief executive John Holland-Kaye said in an open letter to passengers on Tuesday that airlines had sold too many seats for the coming months.
“Daily summer departures will average 104,000 — giving a daily surplus of 4,000 seats. On average, only about 1,500 of those 4,000 day slots are currently sold to passengers,” he said in the letter.
Blame game
Emirates said it would be “impossible” for the next few weeks to rebook all potentially affected passengers on new flights.
It said the 100,000 daily cap on the number of departing passengers was a figure that “seems[ed] to [have been] pulled out of nowhere” and will continue to operate as scheduled.
It’s not just Emirates who are angry.
Willie Walsh, director general of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) and former chief executive of British Airways owner IAG, said in an interview with Reuters on Tuesday that the travel restrictions were “ridiculous”.
“The airlines were forecasting stronger traffic than Heathrow was anticipating … they obviously got it completely wrong,” he said.
Walsh also accused Heathrow of trying to “maximize the profit they get from the airport at the expense of the airlines”.
Heathrow rejected Walsh’s comments.
“What we need is joint work and investment in passenger protection services, not ill-informed comments from retired airline bosses,” a spokesperson told CNN Business on Wednesday.
—Sharon Brown-Peter contributed reporting.
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