Corporate Events and Airline Strikes: How Event Planners Stay in Control

What Airlines Do During Strikes — and Where Their Limits Are

Airlines cannot maintain the staffing levels required to manage exceptional situations in which hundreds of flights and tens of thousands of passengers are affected simultaneously. In practice, reaching an airline by phone or email during a strike is rarely possible. Instead, software such as the Passenger Recovery product by European aviation technology group Amadeus steps in and rebooks travelers automatically. At PRO SKY, we see that in many cases these rebookings land passengers on suitable alternative connections.

However, it also happens that the system does not select the nearest available option, but instead rebooks onto a flight the following day — which is not an acceptable outcome for event organizers.

There Are Ways to Act

This is where it helps to have booked flights through an IATA-accredited agents. A provider like PRO SKY can actively feed preferred alternatives back into the airline’s reservation system, directly influencing how rebookings are handled.

Every year, a single-digit percentage of all flights are affected by cancellations. Since even one cancelled flight can jeopardize the success of an entire corporate event, it pays for companies to involve a flight management specialist for international events — one who brings additional options to the table when things go wrong.

If no suitable scheduled flight alternative is available at all for an affected group booking, a charter flight can help — particularly on short- and medium-haul routes. In April, for example, PRO SKY organized a last-minute replacement charter for 80 participants on the Frankfurt–Rome route, arriving in time for the start of the event.

Our overall recommendation to event organizers: build a supplier setup that remains capable of acting when the unexpected happens. Flights are mission-critical.