Airlines grapple with vaccine refusers amid international travel restart
As demand for air travel increases in the West and travel routes slowly begin opening up in Asia, airlines have yet to figure out how to safeguard against one potential disruption to their operations: vaccine refusers.
Worldwide, only two - Cathay Pacific and United Airlines - have been able to enforce Covid-19 vaccinations for their staff, subject to certain medical and religious exemptions. Employees who refuse to get vaccinated without a valid reason have been fired by Cathay, while United has warned that such employees risk losing their jobs.
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.
Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.
On Friday, the US said it would open its borders to vaccinated foreigners on November 8, and generally bar unvaccinated foreigners from entry. President Joe Biden's administration is also preparing to roll out regulations requiring most private sector workers to get vaccinated or undergo weekly testing.
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.
KLM CEO Pieter Elbers takes part in a panel discussion at the International Air Transport Association's annual general meeting earlier this month. Photo: Reuters alt=KLM CEO Pieter Elbers takes part in a panel discussion at the International Air Transport Association's annual general meeting earlier this month. Photo: Reuters
Even so, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines CEO Pieter Elbers said the labour landscape in the Netherlands made mandatory vaccinations impossible.
"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.
KLM, which flies to numerous cities in Africa where vaccinations are lagging, said it was not going to be "pushing the government" in The Hague to shield the airline if it desired to push forward mandatory jabs for staff. But Elbers said he disagreed with any move to "deprive" unvaccinated passengers from travelling, saying it would risk alienating a large part of the airline's customer base.
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.
Spohr predicted the German government would not enforce a vaccine mandate for airlines. "If the government requires me to have only vaccinated crews where I want to fly ... then I have an obligation to [get crews] vaccinated in my company," 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."
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.
Only two of the 3,100 travellers from Germany and Brunei - the first two countries that had quarantine-free travel with Singapore - have tested positive for Covid-19 on arrival since the programme's launch last month.
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."
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
Copyright (c) 2021. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
