![]() “The picture’s slightly more disruptive than it was in 2019 but it’s a lot better than it was last year,” Walsh says. ![]() After all, the previous three summers were plagued by mass industrial action (2022), Covid travel requirements (2021) and lockdowns (2020). Yet for Walsh, and the rest of the industry, this is practically a tea party compared with what came before. And if that weren’t enough, there’s a cost of living crisis. It comes after television screens were filled last month with pictures of holidaymakers fleeing Rhodes and Corfu, as wildfires ripped through parts of the popular Greek islands. He is more occupied with the present: the threat of strike action looms again over Gatwick this summer and across the Channel, French air traffic control staff have vowed industrial action. There are no clues about his previous lives on the walls even the model plane on his desk was left behind by a predecessor. When I speak to Walsh over a video call, he’s in a relaxed mood, sitting in his whitewashed, sparsely decorated office overlooking the runways of Geneva Airport. He left IAG in 2020 to take his current job in Switzerland, where he now lives. Having first trained as a pilot with Irish airline Aer Lingus, Walsh rose to become chief executive of the carrier in 2001, during the aftermath of 9/11, before taking the controls at a struggling British Airways four years later, fixing its finances and combining the business with a rival to form International Consolidated Airlines Group (IAG), an industry titan. And it explains a lot, given that he’s spent the past 20 years successfully steering some of Europe’s biggest airlines through storm after storm. “It’s not necessarily that I’m a workaholic,” he insists, not entirely convincingly. Is it possible he could be a bit of a workaholic? “I love working, you know?” the 61-year-old shrugs. So will he now take a proper holiday? Err, no. Now, however, life is slightly more relaxed, after Walsh took a job as head of the Geneva-based International Air Transport Association (IATA). Previously, he has admitted to working 100 days straight and even on Christmas Day. He reckons that he’s barely taken a week’s holiday since 2005 – when he took the controls at BA – and most of that was in the past year. This is something of a surprise, given that Walsh – who ran British Airways and its parent for 15 years– has devoted his career to getting the rest of us to our holidays. “First and foremost, I would be bored stupid. “Hell, for me, would be lying on a beach in the sun,” the Irishman deadpans. The summer getaway is what most of us look forward to all year – preferably to somewhere warm with cocktails at hand.
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