THE HAGUE, SCHIPHOL - Travel companies believe that airlines should do more to stop unnecessary travel. TUI and Corendon canceled package tours to holiday destinations, but KLM, among others, is still offering tickets to those destinations.
Crooked, says the Dutch travel trade association ANVR. The airlines say they are doing everything they can to enforce corona rules.
Frank Oostdam of the ANVR calls the snapshots of a busy Schiphol "bad for our image" in the NOS Radio 1 News. "But we have no part in this." At peak times, the airport departure halls in recent days resembled Domino Day: people lined up like pebbles in long lines, close together.
The Dutch Minister of Infrastructure Cora Van Nieuwenhuizen was "disappointed and angry" about this, now that the Netherlands has just announced a second lockdown, even requiring the schools to close again. Especially since the whole world is now turning orange in the travel advice of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: travel only when necessary.
Scheduled flights, not package tours
Petra Kok of TUI thinks that the images are distorted and states that the crowds are caused by regular scheduled flights, not by specific holiday flights: "Schiphol is very quiet most of the time, apparently Schiphol has not been able to arrange peak times properly. But you can still buy a ticket for a destination for which the travel advice is orange or red. We do not offer package tours to orange areas."
Minister Nieuwenhuizen wants to introduce a statement in which travelers indicate whether the journey they want to make is "necessary". She is having this possibility investigated, she informed Second Chamber of the Dutch Parliament last night.
According to the minister, the measures taken by Schiphol Airport and airlines are "by no means enough".
It is not yet clear what a "travelers statement" will look like and when it must be completed. That is what the research is meant for, according to the ministry. There is also yet to be clarity about what is strictly necessary or not. Holidays or similar trips are not, according to the ministry. But freight traffic, flights of people with vital professions or family visits in connection with a funeral are necessary, for example.
Long lines in front of the Curaçao desk; KLM flights merged
Despite the advice to Dutch people from the beginning of November not to travel outside the Netherlands until mid-January, there were long queues for holiday trips at Schiphol. According to several Dutch MPs, this was encouraged by the government of Prime Minister Mark Rutte through confusing travel advice.
Parliamentary questions from almost all political groups found that no spacing was kept in the rows and that this is "very undesirable". Despite the government's advice not to travel, the official travel advice for the Canary Islands and Curaçao remained yellow.
One of the questions in the Members of Parliament: "Do you agree that this may have confused travelers and the undesirable situation that flights to the Canary Islands were promoted and booked against the advice, as was the case for traveling to Curaçao?”
Curaçao went to orange last week due to increasing infections, but the Canary Islands were only put on orange on Tuesday when the general negative advice was extended to mid-March. Rutte then announced in the parliamentary debate that this would also happen for Aruba and Bonaire. In the future, the Chamber is asking for travel advice to be aligned with the calls communicated by the cabinet.