Australian air travellers face travel chaos as COVID hits airline staff

Australian air travellers have endured massive delays across the domestic network as airline staff fall to COVID. Qantas has reported that about 30 per cent of its staff have been absent causing check-in and loaded delays, while the security process has been impacted by passengers forgetting about protocols such as removing laptop computers. READ: Australia’s sky-high domestic airfares set to plummet Rescreening of bags has jumped from the normal 5 per cent to 30 per cent. Over the last weekend, Qantas carried 350,000 passengers on 2800 flights as the school holidays started with the addition of the F1 Grand Prix in Melbourne. The travel chaos is expected to continue through to the end of April. For Easter, Qantas and Jetstar plan to operate at 110 per cent of their domestic capacity compared to 2019, flying around 500,000 passengers from April 14 to April 18. Jetstar is planning to operate many flights with its much larger international Boeing 787s. Travellers are also being urged to check in much earlier and at least two hours before and if possible check-in online and remove laptops and aerosols out of bags at security screening. ABOUT AIRLINE RATINGS Airlineratings.com was developed to provide everyone in the world a one-stop shop for everything related to airlines, formed by a team of aviation editors, who have forensically researched nearly every airline in the world. Our rating system is rated from one to seven stars on safety – with seven being the highest ranking. Within each airline, you will find the country of origin, airline code, booking URL and seat map information. The rating system takes into account a number of different factors related to audits from aviation’s governing bodies, lead associations, as well as the airlines, own safety data. Every airline has a safety rating breakdown so you can see exactly how they rate. Over 230 of the airlines on the site that carry 99 per cent of the world’s passengers have a product rating. Given that low cost, regional and full-service carriers are so different we have constructed a different rating system for each which can be found within each airline.