Comment: Why your beach holiday is at the bottom of the airline ‘triage’ list

By Marco Chan, Senior Lecturer in the Aviation Department, Buckinghamshire New University 

Right now, aviation bosses are war-gaming a summer of scarcity. We are not in the midst of a “fuel-out” crisis, but the odds aren’t looking great. Half of Europe’s jet fuel flows through the Strait of Hormuz and costs have nearly doubled since the Gulf conflict flared up – meaning the industry is quietly drawing up a “hit list” of routes to cut.   

But if you’re waiting for a dramatic announcement at the check-in desk – you'll be waiting a long time. This crisis won’t start with sirens. It will start with a quiet email telling you your flight to Malaga has been “consolidated”.  

When Jet fuel gets tight, airlines don’t panic. They triage. It’s a cold financial calculation.  

A flight from London to New York is a “Big Beast”. It is packed with high-paying business travellers and connecting passengers. If an airline cancels one of those, they ruin a hundred other connections across their network. Those routes are therefore effectively bulletproof. 

But a twice-daily budget trip to the Med? That’s an easy sacrifice. If an airline can merge two half-empty flights to Ibiza into one or tell passengers to take the train – they'll do it in a heartbeat to save the fuel for the long-haul money-makers. 

Airlines are also turning to a tactic called fuel tankering, loading extra fuel at airports where supply is stable, to avoid refuelling at destinations where it's scarce or expensive. It's a legitimate and frequently used operational tool, but not a cheap one: a heavier aircraft burns more en-route, so the sums must stack up carefully. When they don't, that cost finds its way into surcharges and quietly disappearing cheap fares. 

The “crack-spread” - the cost of turning crude oil into jet fuel – has quadrupled. We are entering a two-tier summer. While the US is buffered by its own refineries, British travellers are exposed. This year, the question isn’t whether you can afford the flight – it's whether the airline thinks your holiday is worth the fuel.