Virgin Atlantic has announced its plan to restart passenger flying. Services from London Heathrow to Orlando, Hong Kong, Shanghai, New York JFK and Los Angeles set to resume from July 20 onward. As countries around the world start to relax travel restrictions, Virgin Atlantic will be steadily increasing passenger flying throughout the second half of 2020. A further, gradual recovery is planned through 2021 in line with customer demand.
Juha Jarvinen, Chief Commercial Officer, Virgin Atlantic, said, “As the Covid-19 crisis stabilises and demand slowly returns, we are looking forward to welcoming our customers back onboard and flying them safely to their favourite destinations. To ensure the health and safety of our customers and our people, we’re introducing new measures at every point in the journey to offer peace of mind when taking to the skies with us.”
Jarvinen added, “Our planned first flights will be to Orlando and Hong Kong on the July 20th, however, we are monitoring external conditions extremely closely, in particular the travel restrictions many countries have in place including the 14-day quarantine policy for travellers entering the UK. We know that as the Covid-19 crisis subsides, air travel will be a vital enabler of the UK’s economic recovery. Therefore, we are calling for a multi-layered approach of carefully targeted public health and screening measures, which will allow for a successful and safe restart of international air travel for passengers and businesses. We are planning to announce more destination restart dates in the next two weeks for the month of August.”
