Vaccine mandates trickled into the US travel sphere last winter, picked up steam in the spring and hit fever pitch over the summer. Vaccine shots are now necessary to eat in cafes in France, to see a Broadway show in New York City and soon, to fly commercially in Canada. Though mandates were expected for cruises and international travel, the pace and scope of activities that they now cover — from booking group tours to staying in hotels — has surprised industry experts. “It has been interesting to watch the striking acceleration of vaccine mandates,” said Harry Nelson, founder of health-care law firm Nelson Hardiman. He said that while the US FDA’s full approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine last month has prompted some mandates, they’re also being “driven by increasingly supportive public opinion of the vaccinated majority.” Are vaccine mandates legal? Yes, said Lawrence O. Gostin, professor at Georgetown Law and the faculty director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. “Businesses have full power to require reasonable safety standards for customers,” he told CNBC. “Just as many businesses have required masking, they could also ask for proof of vaccination.”<br/>
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The rate of unruly passengers on airline flights is down sharply from early this year but is mostly unchanged over the past three months and remains more than twice the level seen in late 2020, according to government figures. The FAA Thursday took credit for the recent decrease, linking it to the agency’s use of larger fines against violators. Those fines have added up to more than $1m. “Our work is having an impact and the trend is moving in the right direction,” said FAA Administrator Stephen Dickson, “but we need the progress to continue. This remains a serious safety threat.” At a congressional hearing Thursday, the chairman of the House Transportation Committee, Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., called for more criminal prosecutions of unruly passengers. He also said airports should stop concessioners from selling alcohol to go. “Get a great big to-go cup with four shots in it and take it on the airplane — that needs to end,” he said. Criminal prosecutions are rare, and usually left up to local authorities. The Justice Department said it filed charges in federal court for 16 defendants in a recent 10-month period, according to travel publication Skift. The FAA said this week that airlines have reported 4,385 events involving rowdy passengers this year, with 73% of them involving passengers who refuse to wear face masks, which are required on flights by federal rule.<br/>
Jets of red hot lava shot into the sky on Spain's La Palma on Thursday as a huge cloud of toxic ash drifted from the Cumbre Vieja volcano toward the mainland and jeopardised the island's economically crucial banana crops. Walls of lava, which turns black when exposed to the air, have advanced slowly westward since Sunday, engulfing everything in their path, including houses, schools and some banana plantations. Farmers near the town of Todoque raced to save as much as possible of their crop, piling their trucks high with sacks of the green bananas, on which many of the islanders depend for their livelihood. Volcanologists have said gases from the eruption are not harmful to health. But a plume of thick cloud now extends some 4.2 km (2.6 miles) into the air, raising concerns of visibility for flights. The airport remains open but authorities have created two exclusion zones where only authorised aircrafts can fly. Prevailing winds are expected to propel the cloud northeast over the rest of the Canary archipelago, the Iberian peninsula and the Mediterranean, according to the European Union's Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.<br/>
Spanish airport operator Aena could lose up to E1.5b of revenues between 2020 and 2025 after Spain passed a law on Thursday pegging retail tenants’ rent to air traffic until footfall reaches pre-pandemic levels. The much-disputed minimum annual guaranteed rents owed to Aena will be reduced in direct proportion to the passenger flow in each local airport, according to the text of the law, and will remain as such until travel returns to 2019 figures. The legal change is set to protect all food, drink and retail businesses whose rental contracts with Aena were active on March 14, 2020, the day Spain went into COVID-19 lockdown. “This is a sector which will head straight towards bankruptcy otherwise,” said lawmaker Pedro Quevedo of the centre-left Nueva Canarias party after reading the proposed law. Lawmakers voted in favour of the new legislation by a majority of 178 to 16. Aena, which expects traffic at its airports to recover to 2019 levels only in 2026, said in a statement it will evaluate “all judicial implications of the norm and will take all possible actions to the defend the social interest of the company.”<br/>
Frustrated travel industry representatives have warned there are no more commercial plane seats home for Australians abroad before Christmas, declaring the crisis caused by locking Australians out of the country as the worst it’s ever been. Airlines, including Singapore Airlines, recently cut a swath of commercial flights to Australia because of the reduction in the caps on the number of Australians allowed home per week via the hotel quarantine system. State premiers have allocated just over 300 hotel quarantine spaces a day for returning citizens. Airlines responded to the latest cuts by converting passenger flights into freight-only and bumping off all passengers, giving many no indication of when their tickets will be revalidated. Singapore Airlines is not taking bookings for flights into Australia until March next year. Jennie Bardsley, a travel agent of 29 years from Perth who specialises in helping Australians struggling to find a way home, often for a death or illness in the family, said the crisis had now reached its worst point since the government shut the borders 18 months ago to stop the spread of COVID-19. “This is the worst that it has ever, ever been,” she said. “We are absolutely helpless at this moment in time and we’ve never been helpless; we’ve been the guardian angels helping people travel, but now we can’t do anything.” Bardsley stopped taking bookings at the beginning of September and her waiting list has already blown out to “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds”. While online searches show some tickets available, they are on what the industry calls “ghost flights”, where airlines accept bookings despite there not being scheduled flights, leading to more last-minute bumpings.<br/>
The aviation market in Latin America and the Caribbean should by early 2024 recover to the size it was before the coronavirus pandemic, Arturo Barreira, regional chief of European aircraft maker Airbus, said Thursday. Travel restrictions imposed during the COVID-19 health emergency hit civil aviation hard last year, before a gradual recovery began to set in. “What we’re seeing are different speeds of recovery,” Barreira told Reuters in an interview. “Obviously the domestic market and tourism are leading the way, while the long distance and business markets will take longer.” Overall, the market would be back at pre-pandemic levels by roughly 2023 or early 2024, he said. The executive said regional improvement would be driven mainly in Mexico by a strong showing by low-cost airlines VivaAerobus and Volaris, two Airbus clients. Between January and July, Mexican airlines transported28.6 million passengers, a jump of over 50% from the same period last year, official data showed. But that was still well below the 40.4m travelers logged in the same period in 2019. Barreira said during 2021, Airbus has so far delivered 25 aircraft to the region’s airlines, two fewer than in all of 2020. The planemaker expects to sell more than 27 aircraft this year, but Barreira declined to say how many exactly. Nearly 700 Airbus aircraft currently operate inLatin America and the Caribbean, or 60% of the fleet in service.<br/>
Jetmakers see strong demand for airliners even as the industry braces for tough new environmental measures, but some financiers have raised doubts over forecasts that the $150b industry will return to pre-COVID growth in just a few years. Lessors and underwriters of securities that finance aircraft purchases met in London this week to survey COVID damage and contemplate the impact of moves to combat climate change through regulation and new technology. Some speculated that the industry's deepest fear could come true: These trends might shorten the operational lifespan - and hurt the valuations - of even the most modern aircraft. If confirmed, that could upend assumptions that have made the dollar-based jet industry an investor hot spot for a decade. After trimming forecasts at the height of the pandemic, Boeing (BA.N) last week increased its 20-year demand forecast, citing the swift US economic recovery. Once a pandemic travel slump disappears by around 2024, it said annual demand growth would resume a long-term trend of 4%-5%. read more At a London conference of the leasing industry, which buys around 60% of global jet output, Boeing downplayed fears of a structural contraction of business and leisure travel. "With business travel, I think it's hard for me to believe that it won't be back to where it was," said Darren Hulst, Boeing VP for commercial marketing. Airbus, laying out its vision for more sustainable flying at a two-day company conference in Toulouse, was more cautious ahead of its own outlook update expected in November. "We are still scratching our heads trying to best factor in all the things that have changed recently in the world and in our sector," said CE Guillaume Faury.<br/>