BA August Traffic Hurt By Strike

BA August Traffic Hurt By Strike: "British Airways' August passenger traffic fell, as expected, after a strike disrupted its flights at London's Heathrow Airport.
The airline said passenger traffic fell 0.7 percent in August after a strike by its ground crew at London's Heathrow Airport stranded over 100,000 passengers.
The industrial action, sparked by a dispute at its caterers Gate Gourmet, led to the cancellation of more than 700 flights.
It was the third successive year of severe disruption to BA's Heathrow operations at the peak of the summer travel season.
The airline's premium passenger traffic -- first and business class -- fell 4.7 percent in the month. A recovery in premium traffic has been key to BA's performance in recent months.
The airline said in a statement its load factor, which measures how successfully it is filling its planes, was up 0.2 percentage points to 77.9 percent in August.
Low-cost rival Ryanair said on Monday its passenger numbers surpassed BA's for the first time in August.
BA said it was still too early to forecast the financial impact of last month's strike, which analysts have put at around GBP�30 million (USD$55.45 million).
On Monday, BA denied a newspaper report it was funding a redundancy package currently on offer to Gate Gourmet staff.
BA's head of investor relations George Stinnes said the carrier was keeping its current level of fuel surcharges under review, but said oil prices were too volatile to make fresh predictions about the company's fuel bill for the year.
Oil prices eased on Monday after the release of emergency oil stocks. Oil hit a record USD$70.85 a barrel last week.
BA said in a statement it had slightly extended its fuel hedging to 81 percent cover at an average cost of USD$45 per barrel for the rest of the current year to March 2006."