National carrier Kenya Airways (KQ) is expected to face a surge in refund requests due to widespread delays and flight cancellations.

The company attributed the disruption to a shortage of cabin crew and engine parts.

The airline has a policy that allows customers to request a refund for flights canceled or delayed more than eight hours.

Customers who do not wish to travel after missing their original departure time can request a refund via their original payment method.

In a notice to its customers, the carrier said it did not have enough crew to operate its flights while two of its Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner planes were grounded due to lack of engines and other parts.

The cancellation and delays of flights that began on Sunday morning mean the airline risks losing revenue by compensating affected passengers currently stranded in different cities.

“We would like to inform our customers that we are experiencing some disruptions to our flight schedules, which are causing unusually high levels of delays,” read a statement from the airline on Sunday evening.

“The main reason for these disruptions is the unplanned and prolonged grounding of two of our 787 Dreamliners due to delayed delivery of the engine and its components. The flight disruption was also impacted by the unavailability of our flight crew for certain regional flights.

To deal with these disruptions, KQ is readjusting its network and accelerating the recovery of grounded planes.

KQ Managing Director Allan Kilavuka said one of the planes was grounded at John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) due to an incident by the jet bridge operator who damaged the aircraft’s engine inlet skin before departure.

The aircraft, a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, operates KQ’s long-haul routes, such as New York, Paris and Amsterdam, as well as medium-haul routes, such as Johannesburg, Cape Town, Lagos and Mauritius.

“This led to a downgrade to a smaller fleet due to unavailability, some delays and some cancellations,” he said.

KQ declined to answer questions about the extent of the disruption to its flights as we went to press.

However, this publication independently established that scores of flights had been either delayed or canceled since Sunday.

The canceled flights include flight KQ404 from Nairobi to Addis Ababa on May 19, KQ262 from Nairobi to Antananarivo on May 16, KQ 418 on May 20 from Nairobi to Entebbe and a flight originally scheduled to depart from Nairobi to Paris on May 19. To 11:50 p.m. was also canceled.

The airline also canceled KQ514 on May 19 from Nairobi to Accra and KQ 726 on May 19 from Nairobi to Lusaka, to name a few.

The cabin crew shortage at KQ comes at a time when the airline’s latest disclosures show the company hired an additional 598 employees in the financial year ending December 2023.

These new hires allowed the airline to close December 2023 with 4,828 employees, surpassing the 4,775 workers it had before mid-February 2020, when Covid-19 disruptions triggered mass job cuts.

KQ narrowed its net loss by 40.6% to Sh22.6 billion in the financial year ending December 2023, helped by an increase in revenue.

The company had recorded a net loss of Sh38.2 billion the previous year. The airline increased its sales by 52.8 percent to Sh178.4 billion as it rebuilt its route network and capacity in the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic that hit the global aviation sector.