AEGEAN Announces Largest-ever Winter Schedule, Adds New Routes for 2023/2024
Greek flag carrier AEGEAN on Monday announced that it is launching its largest-ever winter schedule, which includes 118 destinations and 157 routes in 44 countries. The company’s 2023/2024 winter schedule will also see the expansion of operations in the Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans and Europe.
During a press conference, AEGEAN’s Deputy Chief Commercial Officer of Network and Revenue Pepi Stamatis said the 2023/2024 winter schedule will see the launch of nine new routes and the addition of three new countries – Azerbaijan, United Arab Emirates and Moldova – while 7 summer routes will continue to operate for the first time this winter.
“Building on the momentum of the successful growth of the last 18 months, we continue to offer our passengers new options and travel experiences, investing in the expansion of our network with new destinations in the winter season,” Stamatis said, adding that the 2023/2024 winter schedule has grown some 15 percent compared to last year and surpasses the program of 2019 by offering about 1/3 of the total offered seats of the whole year. The new schedule is offering more than 800,000 seats in total (200,000 domestic and 600,000 abroad) compared to 2022.
Dubai, Baku and Chisinau included among new destinations
This winter AEGEAN passengers from Athens will be able to explore new destinations, such as Dubai (United Arab Emirates), Luxor and Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt, Innsbruck (Austria), Bratislava (Slovakia), Baku (Azerbaijan) and Chisinau (Moldova). The winter schedule will also offer the opportunity for passengers from Thessaloniki to fly directly to Cairo the first time.
Referring to the new destinations, Stamatis gave a special mention to Dubai. “We are very proud because this year we are launching the Athens-Dubai route on November 11,” she said. The Athens-Dubai route will operate six times a week, every day except Thursdays.
AEGEAN’s 2023/2024 winter schedule will also maintain specific routes from Athens to Bristol and Birmingham, Malaga, Bilbao, Tallin, Riga, Tunisia and Barcelona from Thessaloniki that commenced during previous summer months, supporting the expansion of the tourism season, while simultaneously increasing the frequency to important well-known destinations by adding a second daily flight from Athens to Frankfurt.
According to Stamatis, the new winter programme aims to continuously provide new options to travellers and also to offer more attractive seasonal destinations for the “non-summer” period (such as Sharm El Sheikh, Luxor, Innsbruck) following the successful launch of flights to Marrakech duing the previous winter season.
Aiming to reduce seasonality, Contribute to ‘all-year-round tourism’
Stamatis added that AEGEAN’s 2023/2024 winter schedule also continues the company’s efforts in trying to reduce seasonality as much as possible.
“We do this by increasing available seats and frequencies at the beginning and at the end of the season, we have a longer period of operation for routes but also special seasonal tourism programs,” she said.
AEGEAN will maintain sceduled flights from/to Rhodes, Heraklion and Kalamata until November and commence its new summer season program early in March 2024.
Special charter flights from Rhodes
In this direction, AEGEAN this winter will operate charter flights from Rhodes as part of a special program to be implemented in cooperation with a foreign tour operator. The program will offer 35,000 available seats to 22 European destinations in 8 countries between October-December 2023 and February-May 2024.
Largest-ever winter schedule follows biggest summer program in AEGEAN’s history
AEGEAN’s enhanced new winter schedule is a continuation of the very strong nine months of 2023 that included the company’s largest ever summer flight program, as recorded by the latest passenger traffic data.
Between January and September, AEGEAN carried more than 11.9 million passengers (7.1 million on its international network), an increase of 30 percent compared to the same period in 2022. The company’s results were also positive in the third quarter of the year, compared to the same quarter of 2022, as it carried 5.3 million passengers with a highly balanced increase both in domestic passenger traffic by 17 percent and international passenger traffic by 18 percent.
In September alone AEGEAN carried more than 1.64 million passengers with the increase from abroad up by 19 percent compared to 2022 and the rise in domestic traffic up by 21 percent compared to last year.
“So it seems that the tourist traffic in Greece continues to hold well and in combination with the capacity and pre-bookings we have for October and early November we can say that we are moderately optimistic that we will continue at this pace,” Stamatis said.
Overall, in the first nine months of the year, passenger traffic in AEGEAN’s international network from and to Athens International Airport (AIA) increased by 38 percent, while for the same period the increase in international passenger traffic at Thessaloniki’s “Makedonia” airport exceeded 45 percent compared to the previous year.
Broken down, the 118 destinations that AEGEAN will be flying to this winter (a 23 percent increase compared to 2022) include 31 in Greece and 87 abroad. The 157 routes for 2023 (up by 28 percent compared to 2022) sees 40 in the domestic network (two more compared to last year) and 117 routes abroad (a 26 percent incraese compared to 2022).
For the winter season AEGEAN will operate from six bases, with 76 aircraft (of which 28 are the new Airbus A320neo), 44 of which are equipped with WiFi On Board, a service that was awarded recently in a pan-European user survey of in-flight Wi-Fi services.
The launch of AEGEAN’s 2023/2024 winter schedule will also be combined with discounts and offers for travel between November 1 to December 16. The discounts and offers will run from October 3.
What about the millions of 2nd and 3rd generation Greek that are in North America , you should start flying from New York, Toronto, Montreal, Chicago, Florida , and los Angeles . It’s like you forgot a out all these routes once Olympics Airways use to come