Airlines fight UK quarantine law

British carriers have taken legal action against the new quarantine law for travellers, which could thwart the sector’s recovery.

British Airways planes © Bryn Lennon/Getty Images
Can BA salvage something from the summer? © Getty
(Image credit: British Airways planes © Bryn Lennon/Getty Images)

British Airways’s owner International Airlines Group (IAG) has begun the first stage of legal action against the government, says Gwyn Topham in The Guardian. It had “protested in vain” against the new mandatory 14-day quarantine policy affecting all new arrivals into the UK, which came into effect this week. IAG deems the quarantine “illogical”, noting that the regulations will not only come too late to stop the transmission of coronavirus, but are also more severe than for those infected with the disease. The rules are also likely to kill off any “nascent recovery” in the airline industry.

The measures are certainly bad news for British Airways (BA), say Siddharth Vikram Philip and Thomas Penny on Bloomberg. With European countries starting to remove restrictions, BA had been hoping that it would be able to “salvage” something from the summer, “when tens of millions” take their holiday. However, it now warns that the quarantine would “torpedo” plans to resume about 40% of its scheduled flights in July and force it to continue burning £20m a day. EasyJet’s plan to resume some scheduled flights from 15 June, as well as Ryanair’s plan to restart flying on 1 July, may also be affected.

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Dr Matthew Partridge
Shares editor, MoneyWeek

Matthew graduated from the University of Durham in 2004; he then gained an MSc, followed by a PhD at the London School of Economics.

He has previously written for a wide range of publications, including the Guardian and the Economist, and also helped to run a newsletter on terrorism. He has spent time at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and the consultancy Lombard Street Research.

Matthew is the author of Superinvestors: Lessons from the greatest investors in history, published by Harriman House, which has been translated into several languages. His second book, Investing Explained: The Accessible Guide to Building an Investment Portfolio, is published by Kogan Page.

As senior writer, he writes the shares and politics & economics pages, as well as weekly Blowing It and Great Frauds in History columns He also writes a fortnightly reviews page and trading tips, as well as regular cover stories and multi-page investment focus features.

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