Rail workers are set to begin a one-day strike at 7pm on Monday night but authorities say the walk-out won’t provoke the kind of travel chaos seen during last June’s industrial action.
Commuters and rail passengers should be spared any serious travel chaos this week caused by a one-day rail strike set to begin on Monday evening, according to SNCF.
The strike is set to begin at 7pm on Monday and will continue until 8am on Wednesday morning.
But according to forecasts from SNCF, most services will run as normal including the TGV, and most of the commuter trains in and around Paris.
There will be “slight disruption” to the RER B service which links the city’s two main airports Charles de Gaulle and Orly.
There will also be some disruption in the regions where only eight out of ten TER trains are expected to run.
The strike, which has been called by the CGT union in protest against planned rail reforms, is not a rolling strike, which means it won’t be extended beyond the set deadline.
The contentious reforms were put into place in January and are intended to tackle the rail sector’s soaring debt, which stands at more than €40 billion and was feared to almost double by 2025 if nothing changed.
The reforms aim to cut costs by bringing together 149,000 employees at train operator SNCF and the 1,500 at RFF railway network to eventually open up parts of the service to competition.
The rolling strikes in June were the longest in years and crippled the transport system. They prompted clashes between riot police and protesters, and lost the state-run SNCF an estimated €80 million.
The CGT union has long argued that the reforms would lead to job losses without reducing debt.

Please note that with effect from 14th March 2015, anyone who applies for an Indian visa will now have to provide biometric data, this includes fingerprint information and facial imagery.

Anyone applying from the aforementioned date will need to book an appointment on the VFS web site http://in.vfsglobal.co.uk/ and appear in person at one of the 14 VFS centres based around the UK.

Appointments can only be booked after completing an online form on the VFS website and no applications will be accepted by post. The fourteen centres are based in: London (EC1, TW4 & W2), Birmingham, Edinburgh, Manchester, Belfast, Bristol, Bradford, Newcastle, Cardiff, Liverpool, Leicester & Glasgow.

Global Travel Management is pleased to be supporting the Global PA Associations’s – Managing Your Executive’s Business Travel event on Thursday 29th January at 6pm.

We are pleased to be a Trusted Supplier for the Global PA Association and are very much looking forward to meeting everyone at the Mayfair Hotel in central London in just over 2 weeks time.

We will also be joined on the evening by some of our travel trade partners, namely, British Airways, CIBT Visas and Total Chauffeur Service.

We look forward to meeting you there.