atflyer

You may want to watch public transport sites in France like of the metro in Paris. I live in Paris for a year, and have learned not to get too nervous
a) they announce the strike days. On other days, you can be pretty sure flights go normally. So if 23 March is announced as the next strike day, do not expect too much hassle on other days
b) in practice these are not 100% strikes. I need RER B to go to CDG. Even on heavy strike days, they cut just 2 out of 3 or 3 out of 4 trains, which implies still a train every 8 minutes or so (and a change at Paris Nord, normally not needed). So just leaving 30 min earlier as usual I could reach CDG perfectly in time. Since all work from home on such days, the Metro's are not even overloaded despite having just a fraction of regular capacity.
c) As indicated on 15 March (main strike day) AF forecasted 100% flights on CDG and 80% on ORY, and some trouble locally. From BOD where I left everything was normal.

My overall verdict - only if you travel via CDG on an announced strike day you have some risk. But even that is a risk that seems not too high. I probably only would do an effort to rebook if you would pass France on a strike day if you can avoid France, nothing more, but even without that in the past month you would have been fine most of the time..

Utskicat

We are in the city this week. It has been mostly great except for last night. We were over on the champs de elysee late afternoon when the protesters built up on the Place de la Concorde then overflowed into the Champs. The national police closed the Champs and the metro and formed long barricades of police in riot gear. We’re hundreds of police (maybe 1000) and hundreds of police motorcycles and vans. It was quite the operation. We were directed in walking lanes north of Concorde and did get close to the protesters as they were lighting a large bonfire in the plaza. I had my 9 yo son with me. I was never overly worried for our safety but my heart was beating a bit. I think most of the protesters are out to be peaceful. We did a McDonalds dinner and got back to the hotel. As the evening progressed, streets filled with cars and marchers. The news reported the crazy stuff over at Concorde but in our area it was just lots of flags and honking cars and streets full of marchers.

I am in Paris for business 4-5 times a years so I know and love the city. I don’t think it is currently unsafe but in talking to many locals the people are livid and taking to the streets. My advice if you are here over the next week is to maintain situational awareness and ask others around you if you see police barricades or large protests in open plazas. And with metro shutdowns, be creative with getting around town. Your Apple or Google maps may not work well.

jerry_greece

As for Germany, they do expect "regular" operations for tomorrow March 18th (at least for STR and DUS)

atflyer

Yes, obviously it is good to avoid places where protesters gather en masse. Macron clearly plays hardball and that makes such situations not predictable. But as usual most of the town is ok apart from a few temporary action hot spots that should be avoided at a certain time. I somehow was in Istanbul at the Gezipark/Taksim square protests in 2013 with a hotel a few 100 meters from Taksim - could smell the tear gas at times. You obviously had to avoid Taksim, but my conference went on as usual and we had a good time there. Sites like this usually give good information what can be expected in terms of what metro's still operate during strike days, and so on: https://www.ratp.fr/infos-trafic

precielous

From here

atflyer

Hm. Interesting to see what happens to my 20 March flight to CDG....

Goldorak

Likely nothing will happen. CDG is barely affected.

Eagle2000

Damn, going to CDG to CPH on the 22nd, would short haul flights would be an issue/cancelled during this general strike?

frec63_ft

I'm flying GVA-CDG-BOM tomorrow 20 March. Both flights are confirmed.

jerry_greece

The announcement says that "Air France plans to operate all its long-haul flights and its flights to and from Paris - Charles de Gaulle on these days", so minimum disruption is expected there.

Goldorak

As said several times in this thread, CDG has been either not affected at all or very minimally affected. ORY was (and will be) affected every time with 20-30% of flights cancelled. MRS will be also affected for the next strikes.

Xandrios

Just got a notification that my flight from CDG has been delayed by over 4 hrs, while I was already on the way to CDG.

Seems like I’m going to be spending a lot of time in the M lounge, probably 7 hours or more. Do they have a comfortable place to rest in that lounge somewhere?

gobears293

Relaxing in the 2F lounge now. Really crowded but not overly full. Departures board looks all green. If you hadn’t read the news, you’d have no clue there is a strike today. Everything is totally normal (for now at least).

Eagle2000

Yes, at the far one end of the lounge there are semi-beds to sleep on and is quiet/not much traffic there. Unlike the 2F lounge where the "quiet area" is actually quite noisy.

Xandrios

Thanks. We got moved to the L gates, I believe that there is a nap area in the L lounge - will investigate soon.

Our flight was delayed by over 4 hrs and is the only one delayed on the board today. This screws up quite a bit of the trip. Wondering if this could potentially be caused by something other than the strikes - it does sound odd to me having only one flight affected. Unfortunately I don't know the registration of the a/c originally scheduled to execute the flight to see if there was a delay elsewhere.