Originally Posted by
corporate-wage-slave
I am going to give my best shot at an objective answer here, without taking sides on the dispute or timing, which professionally is something I best steer well clear of doing.
1) Don't worry. I gather that the threat of strikes can create a lot of anxiety for some passengers, and while delays may well happen, almost all passengers do get to their destination one way or the other.
2) We don't know dates yet, but the way it works with BA is that there is a moving 4 week timeframe here, and it may well be 5 weeks plus. So no strikes this month or the first part of August.
3) Generally BA do their best to run some sort of service, and during the MF strike BA were fairly clever- in terms of scheduling - to minimise the impact. This isn't pretty internally, but for passengers this tends to work out ok.
4) BA will rebook people before travel. After dates have been published BA usually offer to open up all inflexible tickets to become effectively fairly flexible within certain timeframes.
5) BA will rebook people on the travel day. BA being part of several Joint Business Arrangements, oneworld, other IAG airlines and other interline arrangements means that it has more options than many other airlines.
6) BA will rebook people during travel, with airport staff using a wider range of airlines than point 5, pretty much everyone except low cost carriers and SAS (dunno why!).
7) BA will rebook redemptions / Avios tickets, as far as possible maintaining the class of travel. WTP can be difficult to do, not all airlines offer premium economy. Generally it's better to do this close to the edge, if you try to rebook too far before the advertised strike date they tend to make an attempt to find redemption buckets for rebooked travel. Legally this is iffy, but nearer the time BA tend to just rebook in any revenue bucket they can grab.
8) EC261 has changed in the last 2 years. I'm pretty confident that if BA don't rebook people 2 weeks in advance, they will risk being on the hook for Article 7 compensation for delays and cancellations. BA are aware of this so don't be surprised if there are active moves to bookings 2 weeks before travel to minimise BA's risk (and actually to meet the objectives of the Regulation).
So in 2 clauses: "don't panic and read the EC261 thread on the Dashboard".
All great advice, but it does not do any harm to have a look to see what the alternatives are... so you have at least and idea of what plan B or C might look like.
In my case I am going to race a long distance triathlon with my sister near YUL, that is two bikes to get to YUL as well. So looking at airlines and Baggage policy especially with regard to bikes is v. important.
But basically with our travel dates and when the race is... get us to NYC BOS YYZ or YUL with bikes we can sort it out.. but when you factor things like UA will not take bikes on 757 from GLA or EDI, like wise EI from there to DUB, etc it becomes more restrictive.