Holiday Travel Travails in Europe
Posted on | December 17, 2009 | 2 Comments
Ho-Ho-Ho! Aren’t they having a not so jolly travel season in Britain and France right now!
I’ve been reading with interest and dismay about the strikes in Europe that are playing havoc with the travel and tourism industry. First the museum workers in France went out on strike and as of today, the employees of the Pompidou Center are in their 4th week of that action.
I understand that their concerns are primarily the staffing numbers since plans are afoot in France to only replace one out of every two retiring museum employees. Common sense leads me to believe that they have some very valid points, but consider the time period that they have chosen for this — at the end of the year just as the holidays arrive and tourists are flocking to France for a break. It is quite likely that they have chosen this period specifically for the sheer amount of pain that it will inflict on the French government, but the cost to individual small business owners and the French tourism industry as a whole will be inestimable.
Let’s also look at it from a traveller’s point of view. People who may have saved for the trip of a lifetime to Paris, couples on a romantic break or a honeymoon, families on their annual winter holiday — all of those have paid and packed and travelled only to find that they could NOT (for awhile at least) gain entry to the Louvre, Versailles, the Pompidou Center, the Musee D’Orsay, or many other museums due to the ongoing strike.
Now British Air employees are threatening a 12 day shut down beginning 3 days before Christmas and the British baggage handlers have jumped on board and are planning to initiate their own strike at major airports beginning on the same day that the British Air staff go out on the 22nd of December.
Several articles in online travel publications have noted that there will most likely not be any refunds issued to travellers who had purchased tickets on British Air and if those travellers haven’t purchased travel insurance that reimburses them, then they’re out of luck and out of pocket. And since it is the peak of ‘high season travel’ for the airlines industry, it is rather unlikely that anyone, casual or business traveller alike, will find it easy to book alternative tickets on another carrier at a cost remotely like the advance purchase fares that many of these people would have had.
One group casualty of the British Air strikes are the 1,000 young musicians from the USA who were meant to travel to London to perform in the New Year’s Day Parade. One spokesman for the group told the BBC news reporter, “They have funded their own travel costs, many working long hours at the weekend and throughout holidays, to make their dream of performing in London come to fruition.”
But wait — there’s more!
The Eurostar drivers and on-board staff have ALSO decided to strike this coming weekend and again on the 26th and 27th of December thus reducing even further the available methods of travelling between England and Europe in the weeks ahead.
As of the 10th of December, commuters on the RER train lines in Paris were feeling the effects of an ongoing work slowdown.
And finally — in a case that is not actually a strike but a case of insolvency, Scotland’s largest air carrier Flyglobespan has collapsed leaving over 4,500 passengers stranded and 800 staff out of work a week before Christmas. Add the British Air strike and the Eurail strike to this mix and there are a lot of would-be travellers that have a snowflake’s chance in hell of having the holiday or even the business trip that they had planned.
I can’t ever remember a year when forces conspired to make travel so difficult in one short period — and all clumped into one smallish area of the globe. My sympathies go out to any affected passenger who is dealing with this.
I actually have very little sympathy for the strikers. No matter how much they wish to make a point, this important time of year for many families is certainly not the time to list their demands and lock things down. I rather think that there are few travellers who will look kindly on the staff at British Air, Eurostar, RER in Paris, the baggage handlers in Britain, and the remaining museum strikers in Paris at any point in the future. What they WILL remember is how utterly ruined their plans were and how devastated they may have felt when they realised how very little recourse they had.
Tags: airline closure > baggage handlers > British Air > closure > closures > delay > delays > Eurostar > Flyglobespan > Louvre > Musee D'Orsay > Paris museums > strike > strikes > Versailles
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2 Responses to “Holiday Travel Travails in Europe”
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Deborah Harmes, Ph.D.
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December 18th, 2009 @ 1:15 AM
My sentiments, exactly! Well said.
December 18th, 2009 @ 1:46 AM
If your pay is an issue or your working conditions are grim — yes, you have the right to contest all of that with your employer and sometimes a strike is the only thing that will jumpstart forward progress.
But surely NOT to the detriment of thousands of innocent travellers who are just trying to get from Point A to Point B.
I remember when we lived in Europe that holiday travel was always such a crush and when you added the winter cold to that it was stressful under the most ordinary of circumstances.
Now with these strikes and intentional slow-downs and airline closures all coming at once — well it’s a recipe for a lot of severe anxiety this holiday season!
Thanks for commenting, Tara.