Volotea Announces 4 New Routes from Athens for 2022

Spanish airline Volotea on Wednesday announced that it is expanding the range of destinations from the Greek capital with the launch of four new routes this year from Athens International Airport (AIA).

Volotea will be flying from its base in Athens to Bilbao, Spain, from May 29, every Friday and Monday; to Bordeaux, France, from May 31, every Saturday and Tuesday; to Nantes, France, from May 29, every Wednesday and Sunday; and to Turin, Italy, from May 30, every Friday and Monday.

Speaking during a press conference, Volotea Commercial Country Manager for Italy and Greece Valeria Rebasti said the airline this year will offer more than 560,000 seats (vs 182,000 seats offered in 2021 and 518,000 in 2019) from Athens airport.

“We are growing this year in Athens,” Rebasti said, adding that with the launch of the four new routes, in total Volotea will be connecting Athens with 14 destinations in 2022.

Source: Volotea

On her part, AIA Communications and Marketing Director Ioanna Papadopoulou underlined that the new routes are very good news for the Athens market.

“The routes Volotea will be operating are more than they operated in 2019 (pre-Covid),” Papadopoulou highlighted, thanking the airline for the vote of confidence it shows in the Athens market.

Volotea inaugurated its base in Athens in 2018 and has more than 70 employees in the Greek capital.

9 new routes to Greece in 2022

In addition to the four new routes from Athens, the company this year is also launching 5 new itineraries to Greece, connecting Heraklion, Mykonos and Zakynthos with Nantes; Santorini with Turin; and Kalamata with Venice.

Volotea operates to and from 14 Greek airports: Athens, Cefalonia, Corfu, Heraklion, Karpathos, Kos, Mykonos, Preveza, Rhodes, Samos, Santorini, Skiathos, Thessaloniki, Zakynthos – from Croatia, France, Italy and Spain.

Overall, Volotea will offer around 1.4 million seats (vs 574,000 seats offered in 2021 and 1.1 million in 2019) to and from Greece.

In terms of flights to Greece, Rebasti said Volotea expects to operate more than 3,600 vs the 1,162 operated last year.

Volotea Commercial Country Manager for Italy and Greece Valeria Rebasti and Communications and Athens International Airport (AIA) Marketing Director Ioanna Papadopoulou.

Referring to travel in general this year, Rebasti said Volotea is very optimistic about 2022.

“Unfortunately the international scenario is not like we were expecting at the beginning of the year but the situation with Covid has improved alot so we are confident that people will be back to travel and we hope that the war will finish soon so we can all start thinking about the future with more serenity,” Rebasti said.

AIA’s Ioanna Papadopoulou added that the market is still in a challenging environment.

“Right now we are in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambigious) environment due to the geopolitical crisis and all the repercussions arising from it. However, this makes all these good, important and positive announcements even more important,” she said.

Launched in April 2012, Volotea in March 2022 reached above 40 million passengers having operated over 280,000 flights.

This year, Volotea will increase its capacity almost 40 percent compared to 2019, when it offered 8 million seats. The airline expects to carry between 9 and 9.5 million passengers in 2022, which is about 32 percent more than its all-time record in 2019, when it carried 7.6 million passengers.

The airline will operate a fleet of between 41 and 45 aircraft in 2022, up from 36 in summer 2019.

Intermodal Air is the GSA (general sales agent) for Volotea in Greece.