EUROPE. Airports Council International (ACI) Europe today warned about the risk of travellers having to spend many hours queuing at Europe’s airports over the Summer due to COVID-19 checks.
With the expected further easing of travel restrictions within Europe and beyond as epidemiological situations improve, passenger traffic at the region’s airports is set to increase nearly three-fold from 47 million passengers this month to 125 million passengers in August.
Although this will still be well below pre-pandemic (2019) traffic levels, managing such an increase will amount to an “unprecedented operational challenge” said ACI Europe, due to the unique combination of the following factors:
Space constrained facilities: The implementation of physical distancing through all airport processes has resulted in constrained spaces across terminals – severely reducing available physical capacity and increasing passenger processing times. These operational impacts are particularly pronounced during peak times.
More peaks in air traffic: Airlines’ current plans point to air traffic being concentrated on peak periods this Summer. Traffic peaks are a usual feature of airport operations driven by airline scheduling, with airport facilities designed to efficiently accommodate the concentration of large passenger volumes, noted ACI Europe. But, it said, doing 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”.
Multiple and diverse COVID-19 checks: Passengers are now subjected to additional checks at airports aimed at verifying COVID-19 test certificates, passenger locator forms and quarantine documentation.
ACI Europe noted: “These checks are usually performed by public authorities, airlines and/or ground handling companies. They vary depending on their point of origin and destination, based on rules which remain largely unaligned and unstable across Europe. In addition, they are being carried at multiple times both at departure and upon 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.”
ACI Europe Director General Olivier Jankovec said: “Airports are desperate to see their facilities coming back to life, reconnecting their communities, and supporting the much-needed recovery of Europe. But the level of both uncertainty and complexity in planning for the restart is just mind blowing for 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.”
ACI Europe is urging European governments to:
*Adopt and implement in a uniform manner the proposed revised EU Council Recommendation for travel within the EU, published by the European Commission today.
This should guarantee consistency with the recommendation for travel into the EU recently adopted by the Council and thereby ensuring the lifting of travel restrictions for vaccinated travellers as well as for tested and recovered travellers.
*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 also recognize both digital and manual COVID-19 certificates issued by EU neighbouring countries as well as other third countries which are easing travel restrictions with Europe.
*Ensure that COVID-19 checks are not duplicated during the travel journey (integrating both departure and arrival processes at airports) and that these checks take place as early in the passenger process as possible (in particular through online check-in).
*Deploy adequate State resources (staff) at airports to ensure that manual checks and border control processes do not delay travellers.
