The cloud of volcanic ash over most of northern Europe has inconvenienced many travelers, but not the local hotel industry.
“Right now we are sold out, but they keep coming in,” Belle Kuo, the front desk clerk at the International JFK Airport Hotel, told The Queens Courier on Tuesday, April 20. Most of their customers had flights on British Airways and Air France. “The people that are staying in the hotel – we extended [the stay for] the British Airways customers – and we took anyone in when we had hotel rooms available.”
For about a week, hundreds of thousands of airline passengers had been stranded at airports across the world due to the cancellation of the more than 63,000 flights since the Eyjafjallajokull Volcano in Iceland began to spew ash on Tuesday, April 13. Flights in Britain resumed slowly on Tuesday, April 20.
According to the United States Geological Survey, volcanic ash consists of tiny jagged pieces of rock and glass that can be hard, abrasive, mildly corrosive, that conducts electricity when wet, and does not dissolve in water. Ash can spread over broad areas by wind.
Hotels near JFK got hit so hard by the whirlwind of stranded tourists not willing to sleep uncomfortably after their flights were grounded that some of those tourists ended up at hotels near LaGuardia Airport (LGA).
“I definitely saw an uptick due to spillover from JFK,” said Kathleen Pettite, the regional director of sales at the Crown Plaza LGA. “There are not enough hotel rooms in JFK because Ramada JFK and Crowne Plaza JFK recently closed and fewer hotel rooms at JFK have definitely pushed business this way.”
Pettite also described how some of her regular clients called her from Europe for help getting rooms there because hotels wanted to charge them over $400 a night.
“A lot of these people are paying on their own,” she said, adding that the Crowne Plaza was trying not to raise prices. “If it was me, I’d like them to extend the same courtesy.”
