Airlines grapple with vaccine refusers amid international travel restart
- Most major airlines say their hands are tied when it comes to making Covid-19 vaccinations mandatory for staff and passengers alike
- But unvaccinated travellers are finding their options starting to narrow as an increasing number of destinations make inoculations an entry requirement
Other major global airlines say their hands are tied when it comes to making vaccinations mandatory for staff and travellers alike, even as an increasing number of destinations are making inoculation against Covid-19 a requirement for entry.
For airlines, having a mix of vaccinated and unvaccinated employees makes it challenging to ensure flights are fully staffed as operations often have to be split.
“Vaccinations are the way out of the crisis. What we do is encourage our staff to get vaccinated,” Elbers said on the sidelines of a global airline summit earlier this month.
Deutsche Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr said he also recognised the legal difficulties with forcing staff to get vaccinted, while noting that those who wanted to fly internationally had to get jabbed.
“We have obligations for our staff. You have to have a jab for yellow fever. You have to have a valid licence. You have to have a valid medical, so it’s not the first time that we have asked our staff [to fulfil] certain requirements. It’s the only way to go,” he said.
Korean Air CEO Walter Cho said the airline was not legally allowed to mandate vaccinations or request vaccine records, but it would need to comply with the vaccine requirement on flights bound for the US.
“Most Korean citizens are desperate to get vaccinated,” he said. “We will reach full vaccination very soon, and the vaccination rate went to 50 per cent very quickly, especially in our company, everybody will get vaccinated voluntarily.”
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Tracking the massive impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the world’s airline industry in early 2020
Finnair CEO Topi Manner, meanwhile, said that he hoped vaccines becoming a must for transatlantic travel would spur people into getting jabbed.
Manner and Lufthansa’s Spohr said European privacy laws prevented them from surveying how many staff had been vaccinated, but both estimated it was a high percentage – mirroring their respective countries’ vaccination rates.
For now, Manner said he believed testing unvaccinated travellers was a sufficient safeguard rather than making jabs mandatory to keep flying safe and inclusive for all.
But those who have not been vaccinated are finding their options starting to narrow when it comes to international travel and avoiding quarantine.
Airlines including Qantas, Air New Zealand and AirAsia have said unvaccinated passengers will no longer be welcome on either their international or domestic flights in future. Singapore Airlines, meanwhile, only allows vaccinated passengers to board flights launched as part of the city state’s quarantine-free travel with more than 10 countries.
The International Air Transport Association last week reiterated its call for vaccinations to be made widely available as a way to revitalise an airline industry decimated by Covid-19, and urged governments to remove impediments to travel such as by paying for testing.
Those who have had no access to vaccines should be allowed to travel without quarantine as long as they are subjected to regular testing, IATA said.
Brendan Sobie, a Singapore-based independent aviation analyst, said passengers in Asia – which has been slow to reopen compared to Europe and the US – were starting to consider international travel again.
“Some are being turned off by the layers of requirements and incongruent standards,” he said. “I believe the need for uniformity and consensus will become more and more pressing … But of course at this point the main hindrance, particularly in Asia, is simply the inability to travel due to border closures and quarantine requirements.”