The impacts of coronavirus have hit London Heathrow hard. Last year, the crisis prompted its passenger figures to drop by more than 70%, from nearly 81 million to just over 22 million. The airport has also lost a considerable amount of its workforce during the downturn. Now, it is eying a recruitment drive ahead of what it hopes will be a busy summer.
A particularly tough pandemic for Heathrow
Over the past 20 months, airports and airlines have come to terms with stifled passenger demand levels amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Travel restrictions or even outright bans have kept people away from hubs like London Heathrow for the most part, with cargo playing an increasingly important role instead. For Heathrow, it has been particularly tough.
For Heathrow, the reason for this is that it can’t rely on a domestic or Schengen network in the same way that similar hubs elsewhere in the world can. Speaking last week in London at the World Aviation Festival, its CEO John Holland-Kaye explained that:
“Where you’ve got a big domestic market like the US, the EU, and China, there has been a good backbone of demand. We’ve been excluded from that. Our domestic market is 12 destinations in the UK, at pretty small volumes, and certainly not big enough to keep one of the world’s biggest hubs going.”
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Considerable cuts to the workforce
Alongside the drop in passenger demand, another statistic that illustrates the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on Heathrow’s operations is the size of its workforce. Since the onset of the global health crisis, this has shrunk by around a third. Holland-Kaye explains:
“We’ve all made really deep cuts to protect our businesses during the worst of COVID. I think of the 75,000 people who worked at Heathrow in total before the pandemic, 20-25,000 are no longer working.”
Big plans for recruitment
However, going forward, the airport is optimistic about what next summer will bring. It has already seen promising signs of growth, with Holland-Kaye explaining that, even during the pandemic, “16 airlines who’ve never flown from Heathrow before came to Heathrow.” Now, it is planning a recruitment drive to support its recovery. Holland-Kaye states:
“If we’re going to get back to full capacity, we need to re-recruit those people, or people like them, and train them up to get ready. That is our biggest job ahead of next summer, which we expect to be busier than this Christmas. We need to recruit 10-15,000 people as a minimum, in order to serve passengers well. (…) The last thing we want to do is to turn away any demand because of congestion.”
It will certainly be interesting to see how Heathrow’s recruitment drive pans out, as well as its success next summer in general. With a reported four or five companies currently vying for every retail outlet at the airport, it looks like it could be a busy one on all fronts.
What do you make of Heathrow’s recruitment plans? Have you flown from the UK’s busiest airport during the pandemic? Let us know your thoughts and experiences in the comments.
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