Ryanair boss says British people know quarantine rules are rubbish
Ryanair airplane
The Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary on Sunday said that his company will not cancel flights despite the UK government's new quarantine rules. “British people are ignoring this quarantine. They know it’s rubbish,” he was quoted as saying by The Guardian.
O’Leary said thousands of Britons were still booking holidays with Ryanair, which intends to operate almost 1,000 flights a day from 1 July, he said and added, he had no intention of cancelling flights in the peak months of July and August if the rules were still in place then.
“No [we won’t cancel], because the flights are full outbound of the UK,” he said. “British people are ignoring this quarantine. They know it’s rubbish. Ryanair is operating a thousand daily flights to points all over Portugal, Spain, Italy [and] Greece from the 1st of July, the 2nd, the 3rd and every day after that,” he was quoted as saying.
O’Leary said he expected British tourists would still book holidays in Europe but European travellers would be put off travelling to Britain.
O’Leary’s comments come after Ryanair, easyJet and IAG, the owner of British Airways, started legal action against the government in an attempt to overturn new rules requiring all passengers arriving in the UK to self-isolate for 14 days, which came into effect on Monday.
Breaking the rules, which are designed to help prevent a second wave of the coronavirus, is punishable with a £1,000 fine.
John Holland-Kaye, the chief executive of Heathrow airport, has warned that “millions” of jobs could be lost if the government does not come up with a plan to allow restriction-free travel.
“We cannot go on like this as a country,” he told Sky News. “We need to start planning to reopen our borders. If we don’t get aviation moving again quickly, in a very safe way, then we are going to lose hundreds of thousands if not millions of jobs in the UK just at the time when we need to be rebuilding our economy.”