Barcelona's El Prat airport has been experiencing weeks of low-intensity chaos, fruit, to a large extent, of the problems caused by the company Vueling. It's common knowledge that at El Prat, when Vueling sneezes, Barcelona catches a cold, given the airport's strong dependence on the airline. Thousands of people have been seriously affected in recent days by cancellations and thousands more have seen their flights suffer significant delays camouflaged, in part, among the increase in air traffic seen every summer, but with, in this case, a perfectly clear origin.
There's a two-day strike by Ryanair cabin crew planned for this week. Iberia's workers, for their part, will also go on strike for two days this week, just after Ryanair, and two days more during the first week of August. The strike by AENA's workers planned to start 29th July has been cancelled, giving a breather if the agreement achieved holds. The same is true with the preliminary agreement Vueling has reached, although the service offered by that company has been deteriorating recently and in summer is often rather deficient.
All this means that planning air travel has become a difficult task for the start of the holidays. It's not the first summer that, for one reason or another, the difficulties at El Prat have ended up among the main headlines in the news bulletins. The chaos over the management of passport control, which dragged out for weeks and caused a clash between the Spanish government's delegation to Catalonia and the Catalan government, is very recent. To be precise, a clash between delegate Enric Millo and Catalan territory and sustainability minister Josep Rull, today unjustly in pretrial detention in Lledoners prison.
There are two things which often cause great irritation with this type of strike. Firstly, that they tend to coincide with holidays that families have been planning for months and which involve large expense. The feeling of impotence of those who find themselves caught up in the problem hasn't been overcome, despite consumer rights having improved. Secondly, there's the always subjective perception that the authorities could do more in such situations. Both with respect to setting minimum services and in the duty for those affected to receive timely, accurate information, something which often doesn't happen.
What's enormously tiresome is knowing that year after year the same situation repeats itself. And everyone brushes off the blame.