News for 2018
 

A lot of news in the following link!

"The company’s planning for 2018 includes 18 new routes, 11 new destinations, and 700,000 additional available seats"

https://en.about.aegeanair.com/media...responsibility


To summarize:

11 new destinations from the Athens base (Turin, Palermo, Bologna and Lamezia Terme in Italy, Malaga in Spain, Basel in Switzerland, Zagreb and Zadar in Croatia, Vilnius in Lithuania, Cluj-Napoca in Romania and Skopje in FYROM)

7 new routes from Greece’s regional airports (Corfu - Moscow, Santorini - Tel Aviv, Mykonos - Tel Aviv, Mykonos - Beirut, Rhodes - Lyon, Rhodes - Beirut, Heraklion – Beirut)

ATH lounge upgrade by the end of 2017

New lounge for flights outside Schengen by early 2018

+1 for the opening of a new lounge for ex-Schengen flights!

But weren't some of the new routes already operated before? For sure Cluj-Napoca had (seasonal) flights this year to ATH. It means that the route will now become operational throughout the entire year instead of summer-only?

The last 2 times I used the non-Schengen contract lounge, they actually had some quite nice hot food options. Will the new Aegean lounge be offering the same as the Schengen area lounge? If so, I reckon this will be worse than the current set up.

impressive! Is this expansion based on improved fleet usage or additional aircraft coming on board?

Well, I don't believe they have any new aircraft arriving. The third option you missed is the dropping of other routes, which they would do rather more quietly. A friend just noticed that BHX has gone missing from the schedules next summer (it was there and available for sale up until a couple of weeks ago). Don't forget they also dropped LHR-LCA which frees up one a/c for at least two shorter routes. Maybe there are more cuts/frequency reductions we haven't noticed. I expect most of those new routes to be two or three times weekly at most.

According to this article (see middle part), Vasilakis said, they'll renew their fleet from 2019-2025 with 45-55 new planes.

As per Airlineroute; the following schedule is made public so far:

Note that many of the routes are actually operated by Olympic. Which is surprising, as so far only a few international routes were operated by OA (Malta and Istanbul come to mind). Does this mean that domestic OA routes will be reduced - or possibly replaced by A3 service (with A320 aircraft)?

Also Ryanair will expand their ATH base:

From W17-18: Frankfurt, Katowice, Krakow, Poznan
From S18: Billund, Gdansk, Baden-Baden, Lappeenranta, Lodz, Memmingen, Rzeszow, Vilnius & Wroclaw

I wouldn't say that Q400 is the problem here. There are already many destinations served by Q400:

HBE, ADB, CTA, BRI, DBV, TGD, SPU

in addition to CLJ, ZAD, ZAG, PMO -which will run a few times per week.

At the same time, some destinations which were a mix of DH4/319/320 appear to be "upgraded" to only airbus: BEG, NAP, SOF, TIA, so that will "free" some rotations.

The issue I see is that there appear to many 319 (currently only one). I see at least 3 overlaps for S18, which means that flight planning assumes two more are coming... Of course, these schedules (and especially the a/c types) are preliminary and we will see more changes soon.

The final schedule for 2018 is not finished yet. Expect some more bucket and spade destinations ( inbound ) to be announced but could fall under the charter category in conjunction with TO.

VNO is already axed from the system (0 availability). No coincidence this happening after W6 announced this route 3/weekly as well.

Skopje hasn't even been loaded into the GDS yet... Hope not more flights get axed before they even started.

SKP is still pending but:

ATH-SUF loaded (2/weekly DH4)

additionally:
ATH-OPO 2/weekly 320
ATH-GOA 2/weekly 319/320 (V7 flies here as well)
ATH-BLQ 2/weekly 319/320 (FR flies here as well)
ATH-VRN 2/weekly 319/320 (V7 flies here as well)

Further routes are opened for reservation as per airlineroute. However, SKP is still missing...

Why they're dropping LHR-LCA?

They have removed routes, has a complicated summer / winter on same route and i'm still waiting for a decent service from IST (used to be great, now it's crappy). 1 flight a day / DASH / and no business class anymore. Deal breaker for me... went from 60+ to 10 flights a year with A3 because of those changes.