Iberia Slowly Resumes Activity After Storm: Half of Short- and Medium-haul Flights and All Long-haul Flights to Operate Wednesday

• Snow and ice continue to limit operations at Madrid airport.

• Iberia has decided to operate all nine long-haul flights scheduled for Wednesday although there may be delays due to the shortage of usable aircraft parking spaces.

• It will operate only about 50% of domestic and European flights on Tuesday.

• All other flights have been cancelled and customers are being notified. Iberia asks these customers not to come to the airport until advised to do so, and change their tickets in Manage My Booking at www.iberia.com Clik here for Iberia, Iberia Express and Air Nostrum cancellations 

• Since last Friday’s heavy snowstorm, Iberia has deployed all means available, first to assist affected customers and now to recover normal operations. These efforts are being impaired by the current freezing weather, and may take several days to complete.

• The airline has eased fare terms to enable customers with tickets to fly between last Friday and Friday, 15 January to change their flights to any date through 20 March.

• Those changes can be made on the website www.iberia.com, in the Manage Your Booking section. Since the airport was closed on Friday, changes or refunds have been offered to some 15,000 customers via the website alone.

• Iberia’s telephone help lines have often been saturated despite substantial staff reinforcements, receiving more than 30,000 calls in the past few days. Iberia requests that customer use the website whenever possible, leaving the help lines free to deal with special problems that cannot be resolved on the website.

• Iberia again thanks its customers for their patience and understanding during this extreme weather event. For its part, the airline provided:

• Madrid hotel stays for more than 600 customers, as well as transport, food, and lodging to the 2,900 passengers on flights diverted to the Canary Islands, Barcelona, Malaga, and Valencia.

• To customers obliged to spend the night at the airport, Iberia handed out more than 2,500 blankets plus bottled water, sandwiches, biscuits and other non-perishable food. It turned over the Dalí VIP lounge to families with small children.

• Iberia is proud of its employees who worked double shifts and faced extremely difficult conditions during the emergency, and who assisted airport staff in and military emergency units in clearing away snow from aircraft and runways.