Heathrow asks airlines to stop selling summer tickets as it limits daily passengers to 100,000

CEO John Holland-Kaye announced the “difficult decision” in an open letter to passengers, saying “over the past few weeks, as departing passenger numbers have regularly exceeded 100,000 a day, we have started to see periods when service drops to a level that is not acceptable… Our colleagues are going above and beyond to get as many passengers away as possible, but we cannot put them at risk for their own safety and wellbeing.”

In 2018, the daily number of passengers going through Heathrow was nearly 220,000, split between arrivals and departures.

“Lufthansa has thus made a noticeable contribution to relieving the airports, including London Heathrow,” a spokesperson told CNN Business.

The head of International Air Transport Association, the group representing global airlines, called Heathrow’s travel restrictions “ridiculous.”

“Airlines have been predicting stronger traffic than Heathrow has been predicting … they clearly got it completely wrong,” said Willie Walsh, director general of the IATA. “To tell airlines to stop selling — what a ridiculous thing for an airport to say to an airline.”

Walsh, the former CEO of British Airways owner IAG, added, “Heathrow are trying to maximize the profitability that they get from the airport at the expense of airlines.”

Heathrow rejected Willie Walsh’s comments.

“Aviation is under considerable pressure as demand ramps up — at Heathrow we’ve faced 40 years of growth in just four months — and what we need is collaborative working and investment in services to protect passengers, not ill-informed comments from retired airline bosses,” a spokesperson said.

— Sharon Browne-Peter contributed reporting.