Iberia Focuses on Assisting Customers and Bringing New Vaccine Shipments from Brussels

• Frozen snow remaining on runways and in aircraft parking zones is severely limiting operations at Madrid airport, which reopened yesterday after closing during Friday’s heavy snowfall.

• Iberia now expected to operate 12 of the 15 log-haul flights scheduled for today. The others --all high connection-volume flights-- are being delayed to enable more customers to reach the airport as Spain remains in the grip of freezing weather.

• Only about 30% of short- and medium-haul flights, mostly domestic and European, will operate today.

• Iberia is giving priority to long-haul flights and their feeder flights to destinations lacking alternative transport options such as the Canary and Balearic Islands, and also to the Brussels flight due to land in Madrid at around 22:00 h. with new shipments of Covid-19 vaccine bound for Las Palmas and Tenerife in the Canaries.

• Since the snowstorm first struck, Iberia has mobilised all its resources, first to attend the passengers affected, and then to prepare to resume operations. But the record low temperatures following the storm are slowing the return to normal, and disruptions may last for several more days.

• Iberia customers unable to use their tickets for flights between last Friday and tomorrow Wednesday, 13 January, are being given facilities to request refunds or change their bookings to any date until 20 March, using the website www.iberia.com (“Manage Your Bookings” section) or contacting their travel agents. The 15,000 affected customers who bought their tickets on line or directly from Iberia have been notified of these facilities.

• 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 customers 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.