Originally Posted by
ffay005
My interpretation would be that Tuesday's flights to/from HEL are not eligible for EU261 compensation. The chaos was caused by (1) labour action; no compensation, (2) strong winds; weather, no compensation and to a lesser extent (3) snow, nothing that special really, but nevertheless weather; no compensation.
However, the interesting thing here is how long it will take for AY to get their act together. Many longhaul planes stay in the air for 20 hours, leaving practically no room for delays of any kind. If they have flights arriving hours late days from now, they probably cannot blame it on labour action or weather that occured several days ago.
I suspect you are right that it will be difficult/impossible to extract money. What I find annoying is that the industrial action was an overtime ban which has been running for some time evidently. The fact there were no staff to unload bags from planes is poor management as it relates to staff rostering which is controllable as opposed to a full strike. They still have not given me a Property Irregularity Report as there were not enough staff to process delayed luggage forms so I wont be able to claim. As for the snowstorm stopping things, I can say I have flown to Finland for about 20 years and the weather has never caused such delays as Finland is a country where it can snow every day in winter so I struggle to see how it is an unusual occurrence. My view is that Finnair management winged it with not enough staff and the gamble failed. Finally if a company has an overtime ban is there no requirement on them to actually inform customers and offer alternative travel options? Certainly BA does as do many other airlines. Finnair seem to hide these things.