Very busy summer ahead for Athens International Airport

By Alexandra Kassimi

Over 140 weekly flights on new routes, an additional 189 flights on existing routes and 10 new destinations make up the picture at Athens International Airport this summer, which will likely be a very busy one.

Last year?s increasing arrivals flow has continued in the first few months of 2015, with flights expected to post a 16 percent increase this summer. The growth rate in arrivals reached 20 percent in the first quarter of the year at the country?s biggest terminal.

In their majority the new destinations are served by the country?s main carrier, Aegean Airlines. This summer it will start offering two weekly scheduled flights to Bordeaux, Pisa, Riyadh, Tallinn, Toulouse and Sharm el-Sheikh and three weekly flights to Preveza. It is also increasing the number of weekly flights on 24 international and six domestic routes. In addition, Aegean passengers will be able to choose form the company?s network of destinations including Dubrovnik, Helsinki, Alexandria, Malta, Yerevan, Paphos, Oslo and Cairo.

Spanish company Volotea will serve three new routes (Bari, Palermo and Pisa) with two weekly flights and Ryanair is serving Bratislava three times a week. Volotea also flies to Venice three times per week, as well as Santorini. Ryanair flies to Warsaw and Brussels daily, to Budapest four times per week and twice a day to Santorini and Rome. It is also adding one daily flight each to London, Paphos, Thessaloniki and Hania and three weekly flights to Milan.

Some other popular carriers continue to have a presence at AIA: EasyJet flies three times per week to Naples, Czech Airlines has the same frequency for Prague, while Qatar Airways flies to Doha, Niki links Vienna with Athens six times per week, Blue Air travels...