When the spread of Covid-19 pushed airlines to cancel flights and nations to close their borders in March 2020, many airlines quelled passenger panic by giving them travel vouchers that they could put toward a future flight.
While some would have preferred full refunds, this was a conscious strategy for the traveler to not feel ripped off and the airlines to not go bankrupt with cancelations happening on such a scale. Report after report finds that gift certificates and other similar vouchers often become pure profit for the company as at least half end up going unused.
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Throughout the last three years, airlines ended up extending the expiration date for the vouchers they gave to customers — first because of the prolonged nature of the pandemic and later to spread out the flow of passengers claiming them at the same time. Delta Air Lines (DAL) -) had initially set the final date to book travel by the end of 2022 but later extended it by another year Dec. 31, 2023. United (UAL) -) had a matching extension.
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Have an eVoucher sitting around? Use it or lose it
While the deadline to claim those pandemic-related credits has now passed for most airlines, one exception is the London-based budget carrier EasyJet (EJTTF) -). After extending the expiration date in 2022 to July 31, 2023, the airline moved it again to Jan. 31, 2024 — a truly final deadline to use up that credit, according to the airline known for cheap short flights between nearby European cities.
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EasyJet also warned that over £58 million (roughly $73.9 million USD) in travel credits were sitting unused and could be lost by passengers who do not claim them in time. While one can pick a travel date at any point in the future, the booking needs to be made by the end of of Jan. 31.
What is the future of post-pandemic travel?
Initially, travelers could also swap the credit for a cash refund but the option for that has now passed.
While airlines have initially been offering travelers extension after extension, they now have less motivation to do so as post-pandemic travel demand continues to soar to new heights. Both in the U.S. and globally, air traffic levels have surpassed post-pandemic levels in 2023 and have been reaching new records over the last few months. International Air Transport Association (IATA) data shows that total air traffic rose by 30.1% between September 2022 and 2023 and topped pre-pandemic levels by 5% in November.
In the summers of 2022 and 2023, many European airports saw such overcrowding that they introduced "daily flight caps" that placed limits on the number of passengers who could leave the airport. London's Heathrow and Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport were able to drop the caps by the fall but the problem of high demand and not enough staff to meet it remains.
"We don't have enough people to fully saturate the airspace and maintain the level of flight safety that we need so you're just going to have to cut flights," FlightAware spokesperson and former pilot Kathleen Bangs recently told Insider.
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