Globe Merchant Travel Blog

The fares this year haev been INCREDIBLY OVERPRICED compared to the past 6 years. I guess Europe is a hot spot and the airlines see no need to lower their fares to a reasonable range. As long as people continue to pay this outrageous fares, the prices won’t come down. My guess is that sometime in the next couple of months the airlines will see that they have a lot of empty seats on their planes and then the feeding frenzy will begin(hopefully). Until then, you can either bite the bullet and purchase a ticket that is $400-600 more than last year…. or wait… in hopes that lower fares will come!

I’m not going until September but I still get pissed off everytime I check flights and find the best fares well over $1200 and then see the lowest fare is British Air with a 9 hour layover in London, arriving in Athens at 230am in the morning and then returning with an itinerary that requires you to spent another 100-200 euro on a hotel(plus transportation, food and expenses!)

So far the best you can probably do is find a less expensive(not inexpensive) flight to Europe and then continue from there using one of the strategies I’ve posted at GreeceFlights.com

So far, my strategy is to wait until the fares come down. I have some miles that I can get a flight from RDU to Athens(Sept 8-22) for $82 dollars, but the companion ticket through the airlines(Delta/Olympic) is about $1100(Still WAY out of line for those dates!)

If I have to wait a year before going, I probably will….but I feel like I’m paying ransome to desparate airlines struggling on their last legs! I’m pretty sure that with their horrible fininacial status and teetering on the verge of bankruptcy and extinction, I can hold out longer than they can!

You’d think that the way they’re ripping us off with high fares, that they could at least keep on eye on your bags… no such luck!!

Airlines Lost 30 Million Bags in 2005
By BRADLEY S. KLAPPER, Associated Press Writer

GENEVA (AP) – If you’ve ever been frustrated after an airline lost your luggage, you’re in the good company of millions of others. An estimated 30 million bags were temporarily lost by airlines in 2005, and 200,000 of those bags were never reunited with their owners, according to an industry report released Monday. The report by SITA Inc., a company that provides technology solutions for the air transport industry, also noted that “the problem of mishandled baggage is worsening on both sides of the Atlantic.”
The 30 million misdirected bags comprised only 1 percent of the 3 billion bags processed last year by airports, up from 0.7 percent in 2004, said SITA, which is promoting technology it says would reduce the problem. Last year, mishandled luggage cost world airlines $2.5 billion, compared with $1.6 billion in 2004, SITA said, in a report released before Tuesday’s airline and airport passenger services exposition in Paris. The jump partly reflects improvements in data collection, but also the increasing costs resulting from inadequate baggage management.

Greater airport congestion, tight connection times, increased transfers among airlines and stricter security are all contributing to more late or missing bags, said SITA, a Geneva-based company that is owned by the airlines, airports and other international air transport industry companies. But the biggest problem is the growing number of passengers, whose additional bags cause delays and complicate handling, it said.

For the full text of this article, copy and paste the following link into your browser address bar – http://www.startribune.com/484/story/319633.html

The following article appeared in the Kathemerini Insert of the International Herald Tribune

Pantheon will operate a reduced schedule, flying to 92 destinations (26 fewer than Olympic) and less frequently than its predecessor.

Greece was yesterday given until the end of the month to present to the European Union a business plan for the future of Olympic Airlines. The extension was granted after Deputy Finance Minister Petros Doukas met with EU officials in Brussels yesterday.

We’ll see how they react…Greeks don’t really like to be told what to do! Especially when it concerns their little cash cow!

Good news Folks…. British Air is on Sale!(but make sure you notice that my tongue is in my cheek before you start jumping for glee!)

I checked the fares on BA(from Kalamazoo, no less) and ONLY $640 plus taxes. It’s about time something went on sale…Now I’ll just grabbed the flights and put together an itinerary. I put the itinerary together and think it’s worthy of mentioning in what I found.

The seats had to be selected in “Q” inventory…. so I got 6 flights(AZO-ORD-LHR-ATH AND the same thing backwards to get back to Kalamazo… First red flag… the fare was only $640 but taxes were $341.50(that’s over 50% in taxes!). Guess what they added to the taxes- the fuel surcharge. Another little airline trick- add the fuel charges to the taxes so you can advertise a lower fare!

Anyone who works in the US and pays taxes knows that taxes are taxes and expenses are expenses. Can you imagine what would happen if you told the IRS that all the coffee you bought(keep you flying!) was a tax you paid! Good Luck…. The IRS wouldn’t buy it… but the airlines seem to think that we’re not that sharp(or they hope that we’re not)… so they call it a tax and put it under that category instead of adding the “fuel surcharge” to the “sale” price(afterall, it doesn’t look like much of a sale price if you add the fuel surcharge.(see AirlineTicketTaxes)

OK…enough about taxes….but the fare is still not too bad(at last for this year- it would be a nightmare any time up to now!) $980 including taxes(and that was for a 5 week stay)… but… the only way to get a “Q” fare back is if you overnight in London since the only BA flights from Athens that have “Q” seats depart at 7pm!! What about all the empty seats on the earlier flights? Sorry…. we’re going to call those “V”, and “S” and um..let’s see “m”…. as a matter of fact we’ll call them anything BUT “Q”. So if you want to use our $640 sale it comes with $340 in taxes plus a night in London( another $100-200 in…let’s call those…. “personal taxes”? and they can be another hidden expense).

I remember when Pan Am went out of business. It was really a bit of a shock… and there was some sadness as the airline was something that I grew up with(of course I was younger and more niave back then!)… but my how times have changed-whenever I hear that another airline is going under… I think to myself- they probably deserve it!

BA is in a precarious financial position right now and I heard that top management is on it’s way out…. I would say “Good, they deserve it!”, but they’ll probably recieve their multi-million dollar severence package and head happily down the road to their next assignment so they can continue to put their incompetence to work for some other lucky company…until….it’s severence time….and another walk….

I can almost put these guys in the same category as weathermen. How can anyone be paid so much to be so wrong?

After just getting off the phone with Olympic to find out when their sales are coming out…and to be told “not as long as people are purchasing tickets at these fares”, I thought about plan B. How about the dependable charters that are a bit of an inconvenience but relatively inexpensive(especially compared to the inflated fares for this year!).

I called Homeric and their response was…”maybe in two weeks we’ll have the schedule out”. This schedule is usually out by now and certainly has not been released in April in the past. I’m not sure why there’s a delay, but I don’t see any inexpensive alternatives to getting to Greece until the schedule is released(but another part of me is cringing that they may take advantage of the high fares and charge exceptionally high fares for their less than stellar service.

You may want to read up a little on the charter flights to see if it is something you even want to wait around for….

I just got off the phone with the manager for Olympic Airways Washington office and asked when the sales for Greece are coming… “Why would we put any tickets on Sale, Greece is the hottest thing happening right now!”. If it looks like we’re having trouble filling planes we’ll put some sales out, but there’s no reason to now.

So there you have it….now you really will have to play Airline Poker. You’re either going to have to pay a high fare or wait in hopes that something better will come along. I would like to think the fares will come down…but since people are purchasing these over priced fares, those of us(yes, I’m in the market too), who know the difference between a reasonable fare to Greece and a total ripoff will have to suffer the consequences of feeding an overpriced market.

I love going to Greece…. but I don’t think I’m going to pay these inflated fares….I’ll either wait until the fares drop… or go another time!

Maybe it’s time to go to GreeceFlights to do some more searching and bite the bullet…. or put Greece in the back of your mind and wait for fares to drop…