Virgin Atlantic has ruled out an imminent return to Gatwick and demanded no repeat of the capacity issues seen at Heathrow this summer as travel rebounded.
The carrier retains slots at Gatwick and joint-venture partner Delta this week announced it will be resuming services to New York from next spring following the Covid pandemic.
Shai Weiss, Virgin chief executive, said the carrier will focus on its Heathrow hub which offered greater connectivity and that it is ready to operate at full pre-pandemic capacity in 2023.
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This year’s peak travel period saw capacity pegged at 15% to 20% below pre-pandemic levels and Weiss said Heathrow should have started preparations for the return of travel this summer earlier.
“We completed 99.4% of our flights. But on the flip side we cancelled 188 flights and 38,000 customers were impacted, for which I want to apologise.
“Heathrow was right to say that there was a problem ramping up, but not for all airlines equally. We were the least impacted because we were the most prepared. They [Heathrow] should have started their preparations a year ago.
“What they’ve been doing recently is managing expectations for customers to a number they want, which is actually much lower than demand out there. For next year, let’s not make the same mistake.”
Weiss said the discrepancy between what Heathrow believed was full capacity of the hub this year and actual demand was 30 million passengers (around 50 million versus 80 million).
Although he praised Gatwick for the way it handled operations recently, Weiss said Virgin had no plans to resume flying from the London’s second largest airport.
“I want to commend Gatwick, because they have operated the airport extremely well under difficult conditions. We are glad that Delta is adding another service,” he said.
“For us concentrating our efforts at Heathrow has paid back for our customers and also in being more efficient in terms of connectivity. The problem at Gatwick is connectivity. Never say never, but it’s not in our plans for 2023 for Virgin Atlantic to fly out of Gatwick.”
A return to short-haul flying is also not on the cards following the ceasing of operations of the carrier’s Little Red in 2015 that connected Heathrow to Manchester and Scotland.
Wess said the joint-venture with Air France-KLM means its partner already flies to many UK destinations and that post-Covid any resumption of short-haul is on hold “indefinitely”.
However, Virgin customers can expect new long-haul routes to be announced following Austin and Tampa out of Heathrow as the airline takes delivery of more fuel efficient A330neo aircraft.
Weiss was speaking in London as Virgin announced it is to join the SkyTeam airline alliance in January.