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[quote]If you are flying from Athens to Kalymnos on Olympic Air, read this.
Starting tomorrow, October 1st, Olympic Air will no longer fly from Athens to Kalymnos. It will reportedly be replaced by Astra Airlines. If you are booked to fly Olympic from Athens to Kalymnos or vice versa, you will have to cancel your ticket or change it to fly to/from Kos.
The reason? The Athens-Kalymnos route has been re-assigned to a different airline, possibly a regional carrier called Astra Airlines, from October 1st 2016 and for the next four years (the result of a process assigning state-subsidised island routes to certain airlines. Don’t ask.)
We first read about this on one of the Kalymnian news sites on Wednesday. We are booked to fly from Athens to Kalymnos in a few days, on October 6th; flights were pretty much sold-out for that week when we booked, seeing as it’s the busiest climbing season plus the climbing festival starts that weekend.
When we read about the airline switch two days ago, we checked both Olympic Air’s and Astra Airlines’s websites for any updates, but there were none. Then, this morning, we got an email from Olympic “regretting to inform us” that our flight had, indeed, been discontinued, and that we would have to phone in to either rebook to a different destination or request a refund.
Before doing that, we checked Astra Airlines’s website once again this morning, hoping we could book ourselves on a direct flight from Athens to Kalymnos. But Astra Airlines doesn’t seem to know it will be flying to Kalymnos starting tomorrow. Kalymnos isn’t even listed as a destination.
Way to go, Greece! What a great way to support tourism at such a critical moment.
Anyway, we called Olympic Air and have now rebooked our flight to Kos instead of Kalymnos. That will cost us a few extra hours, but at least the airline covers the price difference. (To be fair, the phone process was very efficient and hardly took more than 5-6 minutes. But still.)
So, instead of a daily flight on Olympic, it looks like Kalymnos will now have Astra Airlines AND less flights: only 4 x week in October and 3 x week thereafter until 2020.
As soon as all this is confirmed, we will update the info on climbkalymnos.com as well.[/quote]