Zagreb Airport to close on Monday

Strike set to close Zagreb Airport

All flights departing from Zagreb Pleso Airport yesterday between 11 and 17.00 CET were severely delayed as unhappy employees staged a protest. Further industrial action is planned for Monday, November 21, with the airport to close from 06.00 until midnight, resulting in traffic chaos. If the demands of the workers are not met, the union says that it will paralyse Croatia’s busiest hub by closing it indefinitely from Monday, November 28. Unions staged the stoppage on Friday after the management rejected amendments to the collective agreement which the unions say would protect the workers' rights if the airport was concessioned to a new operator. The airport management said on Thursday it could not accept the unions' demands as they would require "unreasonably wide extensions of the rights they enjoy now".

Meanwhile, the Croatian government has once again extended the deadline for the submission of bids in a tender for the construction of Zagreb Airport’s new terminal. The deadline has now been extended until December 12. Once all the bids are submitted it is expected that a lengthy process for the selection of the winning bid will begin. The company chosen to oversee the construction of the new terminal will not only partially finance it but will also run the airport for the next thirty years. The final deadline for the submission of bids has already been extended several times. The Croatian government says that this has been done upon the request of the bidding parties. Construction of the new terminal is expected to begin by September 2012 with the first phase of the project to be completed in 2015.