Airport Strikes Disrupt Travel Across Europe: Italy, Spain, France, Portugal and Belgium Affected Through October

A series of separate labour disputes is disrupting aviation across five European countries through October, driven by different unions with different grievances but overlapping in timing. In Italy, workers at ENAV (the national air traffic control provider), Techno Sky and ENAC staged a national strike on September 30 over low wages and working conditions, with air traffic control staff stopping work from 1pm to 5pm and up to 33 airports across mainland Italy and its islands, including Rome's two airports, potentially affected.

In Spain, ground handling staff at Groundforce have been striking since March over what the union describes as breaches of basic labour rights, with action every Monday, Wednesday and Friday across three windows: 5am–7am, 11am–5pm and 10pm–midnight. The strikes briefly paused on April 8 before resuming and spreading nationwide; Barcelona-El Prat Airport reactivated its strike on August 4. The action mainly affects check-in, boarding and luggage handling.

In France, pilot and cabin crew unions have called a five-day nationwide strike timed to the Toussaint school holiday break, running October 16 to November 2, over the government's planned reform of the cumul emploi-retraite system, which allows workers to draw a pension while still employed. In Portugal, 188 easyJet cabin crew voted for two five-day strikes, October 2–6 and December 19–23, covering crew based at Lisbon, Porto and Faro over pay, overtime pressure, unstable rosters, planning failures and alleged breaches of the collective labour agreement; around 500 scheduled flights are expected to be affected. easyJet said it is disappointed by the planned action and called current union demands "unworkable," while confirming it is actioning some cancellations in advance to help passengers rearrange plans.

In Belgium, air traffic controllers at Brussels Charleroi Airport, employed by Skeyes, have staged nightly strikes from 10pm to 8am every day since September 16 over night-shift bonuses, with the action expected to continue until October 10. In one 24-hour period, approximately 34 flights were cancelled and 21 rescheduled; since the strikes began, 160 flights have been cancelled in total.

These five disputes belong to a common category even though none of the unions involved are coordinating with one another: pay, staffing and pension-related grievances across air traffic control, ground handling and cabin crew functions surfacing in the same autumn window across a continent with dense cross-border traffic. Because European air travel depends on control towers, ground handlers and crew all functioning simultaneously at each airport, a stoppage in any one link — Skeyes controllers in Belgium, Groundforce handlers in Spain, ENAV staff in Italy — can cancel or delay flights regardless of whether the airline or the passenger's home country has any dispute of its own.

The France case is distinct in kind: it is tied to a pension policy reform rather than a pay negotiation with a single employer, timed deliberately to the Toussaint holiday period when demand is highest, which raises the potential passenger impact per strike day. The Portugal case shows the reverse dynamic — a single airline, easyJet, negotiating directly with its own crew, giving the company more direct room to pre-cancel flights and communicate with passengers ahead of the confirmed October 2–6 and December 19–23 dates.

What happens next depends on separate tracks: whether Belgium's Skeyes dispute over night-shift bonuses is resolved before or lingers past the October 10 target end date, whether France's cumul emploi-retraite reform is amended before the October 16 strike start, and whether easyJet and Portuguese cabin crew reach terms before the December strike window opens.