Airline passengers have just endured yet another round of strikes by the French air traffic controllers this week, the 14th strike this year. This latest action on Tuesday and Wednesday affects many routes and carriers across Europe as RyanAir cancels 94 flights.
Of course it is not just the cancellation of flights that is concerning airline passenger but the knock on effect of planes not being where they should be for future flights.
Ryanair has condemned this long -running action and called on the EU Commission to intervene and take action to prevent the skies over Europe being closed any further by French ATC unions
Ryanair’s Head of Marketing Robin Kiely is quite clear about where the blame lies for these cancellations: “It’s reprehensible that Europe’s consumers repeatedly have their holiday and travel plans disrupted or cancelled by the selfish actions of ATC unions, who use strikes as a first weapon rather than a last resort.
This French ATC strike will impact hundreds of thousands of European consumers and throw their
travel plans into chaos once more.
It’s high time that the European Commission takes action to prevent these repeated ATC strikes from continuously disrupting the travel plans of millions of Europe’s citizens and their families.”
Ryanair and other EU airlines have repeatedly called upon the Commission to introduce simple measures, which would alleviate the impact of these frequent ATC strikes on Europe’s citizens including:
1 – require ATC unions to engage in binding arbitration instead of strikes
2 – allow Europe’s other ATCs to operate overflights while unions strike
3 – protect overflights (under minimum service obligations) during ATC strikes
4 – allow airlines to recover their EU 261 expenses from striking ATC providers
RyanAir is giving passengers affected by the cancelled flights two options. They can apply for a full refund or change their booking to another flight for free. This can be done by retrieving the booking online and changing the flight. This is stresses RyanAir subject to that flight’s availability.
