An airport strike and support actions are planned for Friday, March 17, from 3 pm – 7 pm EET at Helsinki Airport, related to the dispute between the Finnish Aviation Union and the service sector employer union Palta about labour agreements in Airpro Oy. The airport strike will again considerably impact Finnair’s flights on Friday, even though Finnair is in no way a party in the dispute. The impacts are approximately the same as the strike which took place last Friday.
“This is already the second time we have to cancel over 90 flights, which is nearly one third of our daily flights on Friday. Cancellations apply to a large share of our domestic and European traffic during the strike time,” says Jaakko Schildt, Finnair’s Chief Operating Officer. “The cancellations unfortunately again disrupt the travel plans of thousands of Finnair customers. We sincerely apologize for the trouble and concern this is causing to our customers. We hope that the parties to the dispute will reach an agreement as soon as possible.”
In addition to the cancellations, Finnair will also make changes to the departure times of certain flights, so that they can be operated outside the strike hours.
A list of cancellations and further information is available at www.finnair.com/info. Finnair will also communicate with text messages and emails directly to customers whose flights are impacted.
“We ask our customers for patience, as contacting over 6 500 customers and finding suitable rerouting for them unfortunately takes some time. Last week we started contacting customers on Thursday morning and we were able to reach everyone by noon on Friday,” Schildt says.
The catering for flights that are flown during the strike will be limited, except for long-haul flights.
Finnair advises customers to reserve enough time when arriving for their flights, as delays are expected at Helsinki Airport. Customers are also asked to travel with hand luggage only, if possible, as there will be considerable delays in baggage handling on Friday.
We transited through Helsinki Airport on Friday, arriving into Helsinki at 3:10pm. We were off the aircraft into next to no time and on our way to the Finnair Lounge whilst we waited for our connecting flight.
Due to the flight cancellations we expected the airport and lounge to be carnage. The lounge was busy but that was because of the bank of Asia flights that were leaving from 5pm onwards. To us it looked like Finnair coped incredibly well on Friday and our connecting flight that evening with Finnair to Tallinn left bang on time. 🙂
Thanks for your testimony. Very interesting indeed.