Last year was the busiest ever for flights, according to the UK Civil Aviation Authority’s latest aviation trends report, and many industry bodies expect 2026 to break those totals. <\/p>\n
One transatlantic carrier said many of its flights to the US during the Easter period were close to full, with little capacity for late bookings or travellers looking to switch. <\/p>\n
The Manchester Airport Group, which operates East Midlands, Stansted and Manchester Airports, said flights were running much fuller than they were a year ago.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson said the capacity of flights has risen from about 80% to almost 90%, meaning there was limited scope to pivot away from the Middle East.<\/p>\n
Passenger numbers are expected to be up by 10\u201320% compared with last year with Dublin, Barcelona, Paris, Alicante and Copenhagen all seeing big rises, they added.<\/p>\n
However, there has been a dramatic surge in oil and jet fuel prices in the wake of the US and Israeli air strikes on Iran, and Qantas, Air New Zealand and Thai Airways are among the airlines who have confirmed they will increase fares in response to rising prices. <\/p>\n
British Airways owner IAG says it had bought fuel in advance to protect it from any short-term fare increases in the next few months.<\/p>\n
But while the conflict is a “concern for many”, affordability is holidaymakers’ priority, says Seamus McCauley, head of public affairs at Holiday Extras.<\/p>\n
“As a result, we expect holidaymakers will head to places where they can get more for their money and experience warm weather in locations far from these tensions,” he says.<\/p>\n
Additional reporting by Jemma Crew and Faarea Masud.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last year was the busiest ever for flights, according to the UK Civil Aviation Authority’s latest aviation trends…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":480133,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-480132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=480132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480132\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/480133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=480132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=480132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=480132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}