The Finnish aviation labour union, IAU, has informed Finnair of a support strike for Monday, November 25, related to the ongoing labour dispute at Posti, the Finnish postal service. Finnair is not a party in the dispute, but the planned support strike would have major impacts on Finnair flights operations. The strike will affect several critical services at Helsinki Airport, including ground services such as loading and unloading of aircraft, fueling and push-back of aircraft, as well as Finnair customer services at Helsinki Airport, catering of Finnair flights and Finnair maintenance operations.
As the parties have not reached an agreement, Finnair now has to cancel flights from Monday. Finnair has already cancelled 26 flights from Sunday evening November 24 and from Monday morning November 25, and will now cancel approximately 250 more flights from Monday, November 25. A list of the cancelled flights and information for customers is available at https://www.finnair.com/fi-en/flight-information/travel-updates
Finnair had 377 flights in its traffic program for Monday, and the company expects to be able to operate approximately 120 of them.
“Finnair is not a party in the dispute related to the support strike, however, its impacts are now seriously disrupting the travel plans of over 20 000 Finnair customers,” says Jaakko Schildt, Chief Operating Officer, Finnair. “We are extremely sorry for the trouble and concern this situation is causing our customers, and we are doing our best to mitigate the impacts to them. We are working to find suitable reroutings for customers impacted by this, but rerouting such a large number of customers, unfortunately, takes some time.”
Finnair informs its customers of flight cancellations via short messages and email and offers reroutings to customers, whose flights are cancelled. As the availability of alternative flights is limited, rerouting may take some time. Customers can check their new routings via Finnair’s web pages. If a suitable rerouting is not possible, customers can seek a refund for the ticket price.
