Passengers and crew are seen at Heathrow Airport in London, Britain, on August 2, 2021. Officials said 19.4 million travelers passed through the airport in December, well below prepandemic levels. File Photo by VIckie Flores/EPA-EFE
Jan. 11 (UPI) -- London's Heathrow Airport said that well over a half-million passengers canceled travel plans at the airport during the month of December due to Omicron-fueled COVID-19 concerns, and is urging the government to relax safety restrictions.
Heathrow said about 600,000 travelers canceled trips from the airport, Britain's busiest, last month -- and 19.4 million passed through the facility in all of 2021, which is significantly fewer than there were in 2019 before the arrival of COVID-19.
Airport officials said the British government's actions to control the spread of new cases in December was likely the chief reason for most of the cancellations. Consequently, they're now asking for more relaxed restrictions to avoid a repeat in January, and beyond.
Specifically, Heathrow wants the government to remove all testing requirements for fully vaccinated travelers -- and form a more responsive strategy in anticipation of future variants.
The government has lifted a rule for mandatory isolation at British airports, but travelers still must take a lateral flow test at the end of their second day after arrival. Officials say that costly coronavirus tests have also deterred travelers.
"We're on the long haul to recovery in aviation until we see restrictions taken away at both ends of the route, we're not going to travel as normal and that's probably not going to happen until 2025," Heathrow CEO John Holland-Kaye told Sky News.
Holland-Kaye said it's unlikely that the aviation industry will recover until all COVID-19 restrictions are lifted and there's no chance that they will be reimposed with short notice, which is what occurred in December.
There were more than 140,000 new COVID-19 cases nationwide in Britain on Monday, according to Johns Hopkins University.
