There has been no further news about the 23rd June strike. Does anyone know what's happening?

I have hotel bookings for that night in both Rome and Naples, but do not dare to cancel either in my current state of ignorance.

Being Italy and requiring more than one Italian to make a decision the actual date of the national strike will change a bit yet before it occurs. Wait a couple more days before you will be sure about the 23rd.

Thanks, bilbo.

The extent and impact of strikes are hard to predict. Here is how these things generally play out:

A union or a coalition of unions will announce a strike for a particular time period (in this case, a specific day). On the day in question, the individual members of the union will choose to either stay home or go in to work. Management personnel, who are non-union, will meanwhile have figured out if they can operate a reduced schedule or set of services. (if it's a bus company, for example, they might run 4 buses per hour on a route instead of the usual 12, or they might run services on 3 routes instead of the usual 15).

Then, on the day of the strike, everything can get reevaluated if it turns out that more or fewer people than expected show up to work.

So, it's often not known for sure which transportation services will actually be available until the day of the strike. In many cases, train or bus companies will publish an expected schedule one or two days before a strike.

Unfortunately, this is one of the risks of traveling to several European countries (though especially Italy, France, and Spain) during the months with the nicest weather. Strikes tend to happen in May or June much more than in November and December. (Just a coincidence, <i>sans doute</i>.)

Don

tarquin:

I'll give you the same advice I gave you in response to your post four days ago.

If you want to keep track of travel-related strikes, go to www.easytravelreport.com

The site stays on top of Italian strikes as best they can, given the wacky nature of Italian travel-related strikes. It helped me out this spring when Spanish workers threatened to strike at the airports, a strike that was averted.

wanderful, I have looked at that site repeatedly. They say there has been nothing in the news and ask whether it has been cancelled. They also say "Email us," but how do I do that? There is no address provided.

tarquin:

Sometimes there's simply no credible news to report about a strike situation on a given day or even over a period of time. That was true when I was monitoring the Spanish airport strike possibility during the spring. I kept looking at wwweasytravelreport.com each day. Often there was nothing new to report. I also looked at BBC News because the possible airport strike was newsworthy enough because of how it might've crippled Spain's tourism at a time when the country's economy is reeling.

I'm not saying the website is a solution, just a useful information source. Italy is especially capricious when it comes to possible strikes. They can appear to be imminent and then suddenly called off. Or a strike can happen, but last only a few hours. They can pop up suddenly like summer thunderstorms and end just as quickly. It's part of Italy's sometimes maddening charm.

tarquin:

I noticed that near the bottom of the site there is an "E-Mail Me" link for the www.easytravelreport.com site.

I also found this:

Penny Ciocchi @ Easy Travel Report
[email protected]

Found it, wanderful. Thank you very much.