"Ready to hit the ground running" Southend Airport boss says they've prepared to limit travel chaos
Flights begin on 1st May
With less than a month to go until flights begin taking off from London Southend Airport for the first time since last Summer, the CEO says they're well prepared.
Glyn Jones says they're equipped to avoid travellers seeing a repeat of the recent long queues and flight cancellations seen at airports around the country over the Easter Holidays: "One of the things we were able to do because we didn't have any passengers flying in the winter was make sure that our staff are properly trained.
"We spent a lot of time and effort making sure that people are ready to do their jobs, so people are fully aware of how things work and what they need to do.
"We've also been recruiting in a number of areas including traffic control, engineering, cleaning, in the fire service and security, and we've made sure those people have gone through all their preliminary training and security measures to ensure that we're absolutely to ready to hit the ground running on the 1st of May."
Some of the routes available include flights to Spain and Portugal, with Glyn suggesting they're planning to expand and offer more routes soon as part of their post-covid recovery: "It's been an extraordinarily difficult couple of years for the industry and I'm absolutely delighted to be welcoming our friends from EasyJet back. This is the start of what I'm quite sure will be significant development in the years to come."
He's feeling positive about the future, despite the pandemic having severely impacted their services: "We were at two and a quarter million passengers back in 2019, so that shows you what we can do. We're a long way from that now, much like many airports who've suffered in the same way.
"For me the job is to get back to where we were and then to go on beyond that...
"Long term, I don't have any doubt whatsoever we'll recover fully… We do need to see more routes developing and that's something we're working on all the time, bringing in more airlines.
"However, I'm really confident and I'm really pleased we're starting again at the beginning of May and I'm looking forward to welcoming passengers back and giving them a great experience because that's the best thing we can do to to give us the greatest chance of success as the months and years go by."