SAS cancels 76 holiday charter flights this weekend due to pilots’ strike

SAS cannot perform 61 charter flights from Denmark, Norway and Sweden for travel organisation Apollo Rejser this weekend. Despite the pilots’ commitment to fly stranded passengers home, 15 charter flights back to Scandinavia are also cancelled.

Nevertheless, Apollo Rejser will be able to bring home up to 10,000 Scandinavian travellers from Albania, Cyprus, Greece, Croatia and Turkey over the weekend, due to the fact that striking SAS pilots, following pressure from their employer, agreed to fly potentially stranded passengers back to Scandinavia, provided that no new customers were sent away and that the lockout against the participating pilots was lifted.

Thus, during the weekend, 26 flights to 11 Norwegian airports, 14 flights to Stockholm and Gothenburg and six flights to Copenhagen can be carried out.

On the other hand, there are up to 2,500 customers from Apollo Rejser who will not be able to return to Scandinavia after their holidays as their flight has been cancelled. These are a total of eight flights to Copenhagen from Chania, Gazipasa-Alanya, Karpathos, Larnaca, Lesbos, Samos and Santorini as well as a single flight to Aalborg from Chania. To Gothenburg, SAS has cancelled two flights from Chania and Santorini, while passengers on two charter flights from Corfu and Samos to Oslo and from Chania and Split to Trondheim must also forget about their flights.

Many people cannot go on holiday

Although it succeeds in picking up the vast majority of the passengers who return to Scandinavia on Saturday and Sunday, there is a great frustration at Apollo Rejser that more than 10,000 passengers had to give up coming on summer vacation as planned, as a total of 61 charter flights with SAS from Scandinavia has been cancelled this weekend.

There are 30 flights from 11 airports in Norway, Oslo, Kristiansand, Stavanger, Haugesund, Bergen, Aalesund, Molde, Trondheim, Bodø, Evenes and Tromsø, respectively. From Sweden, nine flights are cancelled from Stockholm-Arlanda and seven from Gothenburg, while from Denmark, 14 Apollo flights are cancelled from Copenhagen and one from Aalborg.

Apollo Rejser urges SAS management and pilot unions to find an immediate solution to their conflict.

Earlier this year, SAS and Apollo signed an agreement on charter flights for the summer of 2022 to a value of around one billion Swedish kroner. Flights were planned for 150,000 passengers from more than 20 airports in Scandinavia to over 30 destinations in the Mediterranean.

Source: check-in.dk