With 5.4 million passengers passing through it in January, Heathrow Airport experienced its busiest start to a year since the pandemic.
The airport was "back to its best," according to Heathrow boss John Holland-Kaye, despite the fact that the most recent figures are still below the six million travelers who passed through in January 2020.
However, it does so as more than 3,000 employees are set to vote on whether to strike.
Any walkouts, the Unite union has warned, will cause chaos during Easter.
After its members rejected a 10% wage increase, the union announced that voting on whether security guards, engineers, and firefighters should go on strike over pay would start on Friday.
According to data company Cirium, which tracks flights, 17,458 flights are scheduled to leave UK airports over the course of the half-term, but overall, departures are still down 19% from the same time last year.
In comparison to the February break in 2017, Cirium reported that departures were up 43%. This demonstrated the "continued recovery" of the airline industry, which was paralyzed at the height of the pandemic, it was added.
Many tour operators "are anticipating a busy half-term as demand for travel continues to return to pre-pandemic levels," according to the Association of British Travel Agents.
The services offered by Heathrow during the school half-term break have been "going very well," Mr. Holland-Kaye continued.
98 percent of passengers waited less than 10 minutes for security last month, which is typically a slower time of year for UK travelers, according to Heathrow, which claimed that overall passenger satisfaction was now "at or above pre-pandemic levels".
The airport reported that Border Force was testing the use of e-gates for kids between the ages of 10 and 11 in Terminal 5 over the half-term break, just as it was doing at Gatwick and Stansted.
Currently, travelers with biometric passports who are 12 years of age or older can use e-gates to pass through border control without having to go through manual inspections.
If workers did go on strike, Unite warned that it would "inevitably cause severe disruption" during Easter.
Numerous industries' thousands of employees have recently demanded pay increases to keep up with the rising cost of living. The rate at which prices are rising in the UK is currently 100.5 percent.
An official from Heathrow warned that if the strike action started, the "pay offer will be withdrawn" and expressed the airport's "extreme disappointment" in Unite's decision. It claimed that the business was experiencing losses when it made the offer of the 10% salary increase.
Although Heathrow claimed that the disruption had been "successfully managed," Border Force employees went on strike in December for a number of days. Around 1,000 employees, many of whom are in charge of checking passports, were covered by the Border Force's influx of military personnel and civil servants, and delays to journeys were said to be minimal.
The UK experienced thousands of flight delays and cancellations last year as airports and airlines struggled to hire enough staff to handle the spike in demand for international travel that followed the removal of Covid restrictions.
At the height of the pandemic, airports and airlines cut thousands of jobs, and many of those affected did not return to the sector because they were unable to find new employment.
