As acknowledged by the carrier, a pilots' strike will disrupt the Finnair flights Monday onwards, with strike days scheduled for Monday 9 December and Friday 13 December.
However, the strike does not affect Nordic Regional Airlines, or Norra, the Finnair subsidiary on some regional routes within Finland and Europe.
Finnish carrier Finnair said Saturday it has preemptively canceled for December 9 and 13, with a spillover effect also for flights on December 10, 11, and 14, due to a pilot strike called over stranded contract negotiations.
The Finnair Press release read as,
The Finnish Air Line Pilots’ Association has announced a strike taking place on 9 and 13 December 2024. The pilot strike will impact Finnair’s capability to operate flights and forces Finnair to cancel a total of approximately 300 flights from the strike days.
The strike will also impact some individual flights in the days before and after these. The pilot strike is expected to impact approximately 33,000 Finnair customers.
The Finnish Pilots’ Association (FPA) has been in negotiations for three months with the employers’ organisation Palta over working conditions laid out in a collective wage agreement.
Earlier this week, the association said the talks had reached an impasse and announced partial work stoppages on the two days in December. Finnair said other flights in the days before and after may also be affected.
Some 33,000 passengers are affected by the strike, however. Finnair claims it has succeeded in re-routing nearly all those affected by the disruption.
Finnair's Vice President of Operations Control Jari Paajanen says the company reacted quickly to the cancellations and managed to re-route the majority of passengers within a day of the strike announcement.
As per Paajanen, around 330 passengers are still to be rerouted. In all, some 300 Finnair flights were cancelled.
"That's a really significant number," said Paajanen. "At the same time it has to be said that it is really unfortunate that such a large group of our customers is inconvenienced by this situation."
The initial phase of the project involves travelers on select Finnair flights from Helsinki to the UK and vice versa. These travelers can register their digital passports at the Vantaa Main Police Station’s license services.
To participate, travelers are required to download the FIN DTC Pilot app, which utilizes facial recognition and biometric data to verify their identity.
“It is disappointing that the Finnish Air Line Pilots’ Association has chosen to strike rather than negotiate. This unfortunately disrupts the travel plans of thousands of our customers during the pre-Christmas season.
We are doing everything we can to serve our customers well even in this difficult situation and will offer alternative flights to as many customers as possible,” says Finnair’s Chief Operating Officer Jaakko Schildt.
As per the Finnish national carrier, due to the large number of customers to be rerouted, it is unfortunately not possible to offer everyone a rerouting that is close to the original. In such cases Finnair asks customers to kindly contact Finnair customer service to find a suitable route option.
Finnair says, if a suitable new flight cannot be found, customers can apply for a refund of the ticket price from Finnair Customer Service or, if the ticket was purchased through a travel agent, from the travel agency in question.
“We are extremely sorry for the worry and inconvenience this situation causes our customers,” says Jaakko Schildt.
“Finding suitable new flights for thousands of customers takes time, and our customer service will be congested during the weekend, so we ask our customers to be patient."
"We are all doing our utmost to make it possible for our customers to carry out their travel plans despite this unfortunate situation.”
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