Irish air passengers have been warned to brace themselves for another bout of travel chaos and flight disruption this summer.
AirHelp – the world’s largest air passenger rights organisation – has predicted further chaos for Ireland’s air travel this summer, based on flight data from summer 2022 and disruptions faced this year so far.
Last week, AirHelp data showed that more than 500,000 air passengers in Ireland were affected by flight disruption in the first three months of this year alone.
AirHelp said its data for 2022 indicates that 45% of nearly 4.5 million passengers at Irish airports, last year, faced some level of flight disruption.
“This is up from 2019 levels, where 28% of 5 million air passengers were delayed or disrupted. In summer 2022, more than 132,000 passengers were delayed more than two hours and 43,000 had their flights cancelled entirely. Of these passengers, 100,000 were eligible for compensation,” “the organisation said.
Tomasz Pawliszyn, CEO of AirHelp, said: “Flight disruptions are becoming more frequent in the post-COVID era, demonstrated by last summer’s travel chaos and this year so far. Airports and airlines do not have time to prepare for another peak season, particularly while battling current staffing issues and strike action. The worry for many passengers this summer is that Europe’s travel appetite will exceed that of last year, but disruptions will continue to plummet.”
Flight data from the first quarter of 2023 indicates that more travel chaos could be on the horizon across Europe, as a whole.
In the first quarter of 2023, nearly 32 million passengers (28%) were delayed – a significant deterioration compared with the same period last year, when around 20 million passengers were delayed (18%).
Ireland’s disruption rate is below the European average; of the 2.6 million air passengers across 20,000 registered flights departing from Ireland from January to March, 20% were disrupted.
