Globe Merchant Travel Blog

More Olympic news…. sort of good…..kind of….

Flight stewards at Olympic Airlines (OA) agreed yesterday to resume normal working hours, ending a three-day period in which some 60 flights were canceled due to flight attendants’ refusal to work overtime.

After a lengthy meeting with the airline’s management, the stewards said that they have agreed to resume their duties ahead of the signing of the collective wage agreement scheduled for the end of July.

«We believe that as of tomorrow (today), the situation will be back to normal as we wait for a positive response from management when signing the collective wage agreement,» Giorgos Tsoukaladakis, secretary of the seasonal air stewards group, told Kathimerini.

The dispute arose over the weekend when flight attendants refused to work overtime or come into work on their days off, creating long delays and cancellations of international and domestic flights.

OA said that a number of passengers had been notified in advance about the changes in flight schedules.

The workers have asked that bonuses they receive be recorded as part of their salaries, in a bid to strengthen their negotiating position in the next switchover of the company’s senior management.

Olympic said in an statement yesterday that with the help of flight attendants and the new staff to be introduced, the company will be able to cover the increased needs during the busy summer season.

Workers estimate that staffing needs increase by 30 percent during the summer.

The airline has said that it has already hired 100 seasonal stewards and stewardesses who will begin working on July 10, once their training has finished.

The future of the state-owned air carrier is in doubt after the European Commission ordered Greece last year to recover 540 million euros in illegal state aid paid to the company, putting its future in grave danger.

This is just an interesting article about saving money….
Small measures yield big savings in the skies
American Airlines goes all out to cut fuel consumption

By Tom Costello
Correspondent
Updated: 7:24 p.m. ET June 22, 2006NBC NewsTULSA, Okla. – With 2,500 flights each day, cutting back on the nearly 3 billion gallons of jet fuel American Airlines consumes each year has become an obsession at the nation’s biggest airline.
With competitors in bankruptcy, the message to employees is simple.
“It’s your efforts that are going to save American Airlines and turn us to profitability,” says Capt. Steve Chealander, manager of Flight Ops Efficiency.
And little things add up: Ordering pilots to taxi to the gate on one engine, not two, yields $4 million in annual savings.
They’ve also removed unused food galleys to lessen the weight, and asked passengers to lower their window shades to help keep planes cool and cut back on air conditioning.
And they’ve cut by half the amount of water carried on board for making coffee and flushing toilets — essentially dead weight.
All of the excess water that American took off its planes last year would have filled 50 Olympic swimming pools. That alone saved the airline some $3 million in fuel charges.
At American’s maintenance base in Tulsa, Okla., they’re now taking apart the wings on 757s and adding 8-foot winglets to the tips to reduce drag.
“By installing the winglets on 20 of our international 757s, we will save 3 million gallons of fuel a year,” says Carmine Romano, the vice president in charge at the maintenance base.
Soon, every 737 in the fleet will also get winglets.
In Dallas, dispatchers use new computer models to route flights into the most favorable winds. That’s critical, since half of American’s fleet consists of older gas-guzzling MD-80s.
“What we’re attempting to do here is to use the least amount of fuel to get from point A to point B,” says dispatcher Frank Pascale.
And it’s working. Despite higher fuel prices, American cut 84 million gallons of jet fuel and saved $161 million last year. This year it hopes to save even more.
“This is about saving the company — absolutely,” says Romano.
It may not only save the company, it may help American turn a profit this year.

From the Greek Newspaper Kathimerini This probably won’t instill too much confidence….
Messing up with small and big alike

John Kenneth Galbraith’s congratulations to John F. Kennedy for the latter’s election victory came with a warning: “The state,” the late economist said, “is the kind of organization which, though it does large things badly, does small things badly too.”

Perhaps no one took care to give Greece’s Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis a similar warning when he came to power two years ago. Nevertheless, it seems that Greece’s conservative administration could make a dismal job of both reforming the education system as well as reaching settlement on the overtime work of seasonal stewards at Olympic Airlines.

The long delays and cancellations of international and domestic flights caused by staff shortages exposed a multidimensional problem: Greece’s state apparatus cannot even deal with simple issues such as making sure there are enough air stewards to conduct a flight.

The competition for the recruitment of new seasonal staff will be completed next week and the newly hired will start working by mid-July (after a short training session). That is, after a very profitable month of the high-season period has been lost for the heavily indebted company.

For their part, workers refused to sacrifice a couple of days off to allow the state air-carrier to conduct flights at this difficult time. It’s clear that the fluff over a “state-owned, powerful air-carrier” caters to specific vested interests. To the cost of taxpayers, of course.

The hard-fought settlement between management and the employees cannot disguise the fact that Olympic Airlines cannot provide the services that its customers pay for (thanks to subsidies from Greek taxpayers).

It cannot even meet its most basic obligations.

People can only hope for a final and comprehensive solution to the problem as the prime minister has promised in the past. This is yet another outstanding reform.

Sabre Aviation Consulting Services was contracted by the Greek government to find investors and develop a business plan for an airline to replace troubled Olympic Airlines, aiming to start operating this fall.

The new carrier will probably be called Pantheon Airways. The government will be a minority shareholder of the new carrier. Pantheon should be run as a private airline.

Pantheon’s structure appears similar to that of SN Brussels Airlines, which arose from the bankrupt Belgian national carrier Sabena. Pantheon will operate primarily within Europe.

I just read in my Budget Travel magazine that Lufthansa has just announced a new program with round trip flights within Europe starting at $132. I looked around on their web site and but didn’t find any mention of it(so maybe you have to complete the quote machine to get the fares- so you might want to try it). I’m pretty sure that the round trips will be to and from Germany, so it will be of use to a limited number of people, but it’s worth a try).

While I was there I tried a search to see what fares looked like from Raleigh/Durham to Athens for the dates I was flying on Delta(Sept 9-27). I found flights for $937 on Sept 6-25 which isn’t bad($580 + tax). I paid $930 including tax(but that was a net fare with no markup). I prefer the flights(even though I don’t prefer the airline), because Delta has a nonstop from NY while Lufthanas has two connections making the trip a little longer and a little more wearing!

Just for “fun”, I tried to book the Lufthansa flights on my Sabre Reservation System but didn’t find that fare… the lowest Lufthansa fare I found is $1572! So Lufthansa is also playing the little ease out the agent trick(They give us a 4% commission on a lot of our tickets, but it looks like we have to make a decision to sell a ticket for $1550 and make 4% while hoping that the client doesn’t realize that they could go directly to Lufthansa and get a ticket for $937.

I get the feeling that the airlines are waging a public relations war and trying to make the agents look like the bad guys! As I learn more about the major airlines I’m realizing that no matter how much they work to present themselves as a rocksteady Giant in the Sky… they are all racing around like desperate rats trying to develop a formula that will increase their profits.

I think that they are envious of Southwestern Airlines which is a very profitable airline with a model that has produced loyal customers and no outside sales agents. The only problem is that the larger airlines don’t offer the service that Southwestern does, nor the loyalty. How do they expect to get loyalty from passengers, if they have no loyalty of their own to offer?

A couple of years I was surprised that Delta cut out it’s commission to it’s agents… sure, it’s nice to cut out those commissions that you pay those pesky little agents…. but when you have thousands of them across the country, that’s a powerful little sales force working for you(and you don’t even have to pay them unless they work!) No minimum wage, no benefits…. that is every employers dream, but not Delta’s…

As I said earlier they then began a little trick of selling their published tickets for less then agents could purchased their wholesale tickets from Delta. We still managed to hold on as there were still some net fares that we could sell for less than their published fares and some agents just added on a $20-25+ service charge.

It doesn’t look like the resourefulness of the the agents sat well with Delta. We’re like that piece of toilet paper stuck to the sole of your shoe that you can’t quite shake off… and so Delta has taken it’s next step: Force agents to sell land arrangements(either hotel, auto rental or cruises, tours etc..) if they want to sell a net fare ticket. They’ve followed the lead of Air France(the one with the really low fares that is being threatened with a law suit for illegally using it’s domestic income to subsidize it’s international flights) with this nifty little trick.

Logically, there is no reason for them to require the sale of a land package. It doesn’t increase their revenue one bit… and why would they care if an agent books a hotel for a client in Outer Mongolia? But their logic is that it will…. force more of those pesky agents to stop selling Delta’s tickets and cutting into their profits!

What will the result of this be? Delta will sell less tickets and since they’re operating on the verge of extinction, that’s a pretty dumb move.(think of what happens to a newspaper if they remove all their pay boxes from a city!)

I can’t help thinking that Delta won’t be around long as their downward spiral continues…. but on the other hand I’m also curios to know what huge bonuses the management who made these bad decisions will be recieving.

Delta is flexing it’s withering muscles and hoarsely roaring at it’s once respected agents…but I think I know who will have the last laugh!

I’m planning my trip to Greece in the fall and I decided to try to save some money and use my Delta Skymiles. I have 55,000 miles and need 50,000 for a round trip ticket from Raleigh/Durham to Athens. Sounds easy…

So I put in the dates and then there is a little note about the Skysaver and Sky choice. Sky saver only needs 50,000 while Skychoice needs 100,000 miles. They have a little description and explain that Skychoice are during the peak travel times. I punched in my dates and…. found a Skysaver fare to get to Greece on Sept 9(but I would have to leave RDU at 6am and spend 7 hours waiting for my flight). That’s ridiculous-especially since there are seats available on other flights with better departure and connection times. But…it’s a free ticket so I’ll take it….

Now for the return…whoops… no Skysaver seats available at all… in Sept or Oct…. and if you combine a Skysaver with a Skychoice the number of miles isn’t 75,000, but 100,000 so there’s no combining the two…. shoot… ok… let me try something else…

I tried a couple of 2 week periods in January(the worst time to go to Greece)…and… no Skysaver seats… and then I tried Feb… same thing…. I never realized that Jan/Feb traveling to Greece is a peak period…but then again, with the airlines you learn something new everyday… but the friendly skies are really the ripoff skies….that I do know for sure!(see Friendly Skies or Skyway Robbery)

The other thing that seems to be planted in the back of my mind was that when I signed up I was told that I needed 50,000 miles to fly to Europe…. where did the 100,000 miles come from? Let me guess… they’ll say they’re making more seats available so they’re offering then at higher miles, but with the fact that they have nothing available for 50,000 in Jan, my guess is that they cut back the number of 50,000 seats.

And Delta wonders why there is no customer loyalty…. because they have no loyalty to their customers…. if Delta goes under and disappears off the face of the earth and I lose my 55,000 miles before using them I won’t be distraught…. In fact it will be worth it!!