Today, another incident was added to the Iberia handling strike that left scenes of tension at the Barcelona airport. A Vueling flight between the Canary Islands and Bilbao had to be diverted to El Prat in the early hours of Saturday to Sunday due to bad weather and a delay in takeoff (the Basque airport closes at midnight and the plane could not land there). A total of 180 passengers from this flight arrived after 1 in the morning at the Catalan airport and spent a few hours there until they were transferred to a hotel and returned to El Prat this morning. Travelers reported “misinformation”, which caused great anger and moments of nervousness on a day of high activity in El Prat. The airline offered them the option of returning to Bilbao by bus yesterday or doing so today on a flight, according to Vueling.
“We left Gran Canaria yesterday three hours late because the suitcases were not loaded and we knew that we would not be able to get to Bilbao because the airport closes at 12 at night,” José Ignacio Orderiza, one of the passengers, explained to EFE. native of the Basque Country. According to their story, the company told them that it was sending them to Barcelona, ??where they arrived around one-thirty in the morning and that they “had them lying at the airport, with children sleeping on the floor and everything” until 4:30 or 5:00 a.m. when a bus appeared and took them to a hotel.
“They woke us up at 9:00 a.m. to bring us back to the airport, telling us that we would fly by plane and now they tell us that we will go in three buses,” he said, recalling that the journey by road is about 8 and a half hours.
This morning there were also other travelers affected by the Iberia handling strike, which is three days old today, in terminal 1 of Barcelona airport.
El Prat has been, along with the Canary Islands and Bilbao, one of the airports most affected by the ground handling strike. Iberia explained today that it is working to take the suitcases that were left on the ground on Saturday in Barcelona to their destination. The total follow-up of unemployment this Sunday was 20.2%. The strike ends tomorrow, Monday.
