UK citizens travelling from red list countries should be allowed to isolate at home rather than pay out thousands of pounds to stay in quarantine hotels, airport bosses have claimed.
Bosses at Heathrow Airport have urged Prime Minister Boris Johnson to reduce restrictions as soon as it is safe - so passengers can be reunited with loved ones for Christmas.
Heathrow chief executive John Holland-Kaye said: “By allowing Brits to isolate at home, ministers can make sure they are reunited with their loved ones this Christmas."
He added: "It would send a strong signal that restrictions on travel will be removed as soon as safely possible to give passengers the confidence to book for 2022, opening up thousands of new jobs for local people at Heathrow. Let’s reunite families for Christmas.”
The UK travel red list and stricter testing rules were reintroduced in a bid to slow the spread of the Omicron variant of Covid-19, but these have hit passenger confidence with demand for travel down by 6 per cent on pre-pandemic levels, despite the USA reopening earlier in the month.
Heathrow - the UK's biggest airport - has reported a “high level” of cancellations by business travellers concerned about being trapped overseas because of pre-departure testing, saying this shows the “potential harm to the economy of travel restrictions.”
A statement from the airport added: "If the Government signals that aviation could restart soon, that will give employers at Heathrow the confidence to start recruiting and training thousands of people from the local community ahead of next summer.
"We do not expect that international travel will recover to 2019 levels until at least all travel restrictions (including testing) are removed from all the markets that we serve, at both ends of the route, and there is no risk of new restrictions, such as quarantine, being imposed. This is likely to be several years away."
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