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London’s Heathrow Airport Caps Summer Passenger Numbers to Deal With Spiralling Travel Chaos

The airport also asked airlines to stop selling new tickets for travel this summer.

London’s Heathrow Airport has said it will limit its number of departing passengers to 100,000 a day until September to try to cope with staff shortages and soaring demand that have plunged international air travel across Europe into chaos. The travel hub has also instructed airlines to not sell any more tickets for the summer season. The passenger cap—which comes into effect Tuesday—follows similar actions taken by London’s Gatwick Airport and Amsterdam’s Schiphol to try to ease the overwhelming pressure put on the travel industry as demand for flights has exploded in the wake of pandemic layoffs. Heathrow said it had considered increasing staffing capacity in recent weeks before imposing the passenger limit. “We have started to see periods when service drops to a level that is not acceptable,” Heathrow Chief Executive John Holland-Kaye said in a statement. “Long queue times, delays for passengers requiring assistance, bags not traveling with passengers or arriving late, low punctuality, and last-minute cancellations.”