Brits planning holidays abroad may need to steel themselves for long queues, delays and cancellations at some of the UK's biggest airports, analysts are predicting.
Thousands of UK holidaymakers already faced disruption over Easter weekend as huge demand coincided with strikes between April 5 and 11.
Flight data obtained by the Mirror looked at London's travel hubs such as Gatwick, Luton, Heathrow and Stansted, and found that out of all the people flying out of the country over the Easter week, 10,705 were delayed by more than three hours.
At the same time, 33,664 or 2% of the total had their flights cancelled.
Broken down by airport, 31% were disrupted at Gatwick, 30% at Luton, 27% at Heathrow and 25% at Stansted.
In every category looked at by the Mirror in conjunction with AirHelp, this Easter was the worst of the past four years for the London hubs.
It was hoped that the spring and summer of 2022 were a post-Covid lockdown blip, explained away by the short amount of time airports and airlines had to get up to speed after travel restrictions were lifted.
Tomasz Pawliszyn, CEO of AirHelp, said "a level of disruption" was expected this Easter due partly to strikes.
He said it was clear from this Easter's travel data that airlines and airports are still "struggling to navigate the UK’s post-pandemic travel appetite" and warned that the Easter figures could suggest more chaos coming for the summer.
He said: "With summer a matter of weeks away, airports and airlines simply do not have enough time to adequately prepare for another peak season - one that will be far busier than the recent Easter period.
"Last summer, there were more than 32 million UK passengers jetting off on their summer holidays - a significantly higher number than the 1.9 million who travelled for Easter.
"Of these 32 million, only 17.7 million passengers departed on time in 2022, with 1.2 million passengers delayed by more than two hours and almost half a million passengers had their flights cancelled entirely.
"Despite the number of passengers that travelled in summer 2019 being eight million passengers higher than summer 2022, last year saw 500,000 more passengers delayed by more than two hours, and 200,000 more passengers faced cancellations.
"The concern for many holiday-goers this year is that air travel could be reaching, or perhaps exceeding, 2019 levels. Yet there have been few indications of disruption levels improving.
"We can see from summer 2021 - a year where travel was limited - that when travel demand is manageable for airports and airlines, disruptions occur far less.
"Of the 9.9 million air passengers that travelled in 2021, 8.9 million departed on time and only 60,000 were delayed more than two hours."
Last summer hundreds of thousands of Brits found themselves swept up in airport chaos, ending up in huge queues.
On one particularly busy day at Manchester Airport the line for security stretched back out of the airport terminal into the car park.
Some managed to get out of the country but were then stranded there unable to get home for several days when their flights home were cancelled.
When they eventually did get back, many were forced to battle it out with their airline for months in order to get a refund and compensation.
Part of the cause of the chaos was understood to be a lack of staff at airports, with baggage handlers particularly badly impacted, in part due to the long amount of time it takes to vet new recruits.
In an attempt to cut queue times at security and bag check, Heathrow Airport introduced a 100,000 passenger a day cap for several months.
The move worked in terms of cutting wait times, but enraged airline operators who had to cancel some flights.
At a number of UK airports bag collection hauls became clogged up with unclaimed luggage due to lengthy delays, with one irate passenger filmed trying to crawl into the mechanism of the baggage carousel to retrieve their belongings.
Whether or not such levels of chaos return this spring and summer - when the Coronation weekend and a 50% cut in domestic flight tax are likely to boost demand significantly - remains to be seen.
