There’s been considerable back and forth between British Airways and the UNITE union over the impact of the strike. UNITE has been putting out dire reports of empty terminals, parked planes and no passengers being flown. The reality could not be further from the truth.
Since this is the last day of the strike – BA have released a statement measuring the impact of the strike and how many people they were able to fly after all. Most interesting is the final cost estimates of the strike – which were greatly reduced due to BA’s excellent contigiency plans they had put in place.
Hopefully, the next 4 day strike scheduled to go forward Saturday will go as smoothly for BA and they can put this messy business behind them.
BA Statement:
Contingency plans for the three days of industrial disruption have been very successful.
Over the first two days, the airline operated 273 or 78 per cent of its longhaul flights and 442 or 50 per cent of its shorthaul flights. Seat factors were good at 68 per cent in longhaul and 69 per cent in shorthaul. Club World seat factor was just under 60 per cent. In addition the airline operated 70 positioning flights, which in most cases carried cargo, to return passengers home with minimum disruption.
We started the weekend with 82,573 bookings for the two days after our reservation teams had worked with our customers to reduce bookings (including accommodating some passengers for travel in the days leading up to the weekend) to reflect the smaller flying programme. In fact, over the two days we carried 86,262 passengers, due to late additional bookings.
This strong operational performance made possible by dedicated BA staff has significantly reduced the financial impact of the disruption. Current best estimate is that the 3-day industrial action will cost £7 million a day. Assessment of the cost of potential future industrial action can only be made after the event. As a result full year earnings expectations to March 31, 2010 remains broadly unchanged.
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Anglotopia was founded by Jonathan and Jackie Thomas for people who love Britain - whether it's British TV, Culture, History or Travel - we cover it all. Anglotopia was started to get us back to the UK for a trip and it did that in 2009. Now, the goal is for Anglotopia to make our dreams of traveling to the UK whenever we want a reality.
