(Bloomberg) — Airlines have been petitioning for months to ease a pandemic-era restriction on arrivals from abroad. Now that the White House has lifted mandatory Covid testing for inbound passengers, the industry may rue having its collective wish granted just ahead of the busiest time of year for travel.
As of June 12, travelers by air will join those at land ports of entry in no longer needing to submit negative Covid test results. That rule has depressed traffic and delayed a recovery for long-haul international service, airline lobbyists and the U.S. Travel Association have told the Biden administration repeatedly.
But no more mandatory tests may presage an upswell in demand the industry is ill-prepared to handle. The situation in Europe — where mandatory testing was abandoned as early as January in the UK — isn’t encouraging.
From Dublin to London, Amsterdam to Frankfurt, airports in Europe are awash in leisure travelers they can’t process quickly enough because of insufficient staffing. The spectacle of enormous airport queues has become a travel blight across Europe, inciting the Irish government’s ire, prompting Dutch airline KLM, a unit of Air France-KLM, to cap ticket sales to help alleviate the burden at its main hub and persuading airlines to curb their schedules.
Read more: Strikes and Labor Shortages Leave European Airports in Chaos (1)
The lapse of the testing requirement in the US will attract 5.4 million additional travelers, and $9 billion in spending through the rest of 2022, the association said Friday in a statement. Otherwise, the rule would have kept U.S. visitor arrivals at 48 million for all of this year, 40% below 2019 levels, according to the association’s previous forecast.
Overall passenger numbers at US airports have remained slightly below pre-pandemic levels, according to Transportation Security Administration data. But passenger counts at some airports such as Miami International are above pre-pandemic numbers and the TSA last month warned travelers to be patient as volumes grow this summer.
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