The decision by firefighters and security staff to call strikes at the UK's major airports is likely to cause serious disruption to Christmas travel and hit tourism hard in an important month.

Strikes have been called for four dates in December, including the day before Christmas Eve - traditionally one of the busiest travel days of the period - as well as for 2 January, impacting on New Year travel.

While December is traditionally a relatively quiet month for air travel in the UK, the two days before Christmas see a peak in passengers numbers.

Strike Dates

28 November 2 December 10 December 15 December 23 December 2 January

The British Airport Authority (BAA) estimated around 1.1m people travelled on the weekend of 21-24 December last year, out of a total of about 8m for the month as a whole.

BAA said they were hopeful of reaching an agreement with unions that would end the threat of strike action, but were looking at contingency plans to ensure airports did not grind to a halt.

Sam Birmingham, a spokeswoman for BAA, said they may have to consider the sort of measures brought in to tackle the travel chaos that followed last year's 11 September attacks on the US.

Closure threat

She said: "At that time, we were suddenly faced with a very different playing field.

"One of the things we did was to redeploy people from office jobs onto security - certainly to posts where there was no specific security training needed.

"We might have to look at doing something similar, but obviously we are hopeful that the situation will be resolved before then."

But the threat of total closure remains real.

The Transport and General Workers Union said Civil Aviation Authority rules insisted airports had to close if firefighters and security staff were on strike.

Passengers face long delays and cancellations

Following a traumatic 2001 for tourism, strikes in December could be a serious setback at the end of a year that has shown some signs of recovery.

December 2001 was a particularly difficult month, with overseas spending falling 19% to �765m - and there have been hopes of a major improvement this year.

But Rebecca Milton, of the English Tourism Council, said: "December is a very important month for domestic flights because people tend to visit their relatives for Christmas, or they are staying in hotels or cottages for New Year.

Peak travel

"Tourism has been improving in the year as a whole, it is returning to its 2000 levels, before the foot-and-mouth outbreak, but it is just getting back to those levels, it has not shown any growth since then."

She said the timing of the strikes could cause particular travel problems.

"The 23rd is terribly close to Christmas and it will also mess up travel on the 24th because of the backlog.

"Christmas Eve is one of the peak travel times."