Olympic or Aegean??
 

We are planning a trip to Greece - Athens-Crete-Santorini. Trying to decide if we should use Olympic or Aegean air lines for our travel within Greece. Both seem to have spotty histories.

Also, does anyone have experience in booking flights to the islands once you are in Greece. Understand that the ticket prices can be much less than booking them from the US. Thanks

I've used both Aegean and Olympic and really don't see much difference between the two, so I go for the best price. I buy my tickets for inter-island travel in Greece because it is just easier to do so and I have never in the 25 years or so that I have been spending part-time in Greece have had a problem getting the ticket that I wanted. I can't say whether the prices are cheaper that way since I always buy in Greece. It is very easy -- for example, upon arrival from the US, if you know when you want to leave Athens, you can stop at the ticket counter in the airport and buy the tickets you need. You can check the prices on the Olympic and Aegean websites, so that you know which airlines you want to use. There are also many travel agents in Athens that you can just drop by and purchase tickets. Good luck!

Re potential price differences -- I don't know how true this is. I considered this possibility and asked a travel agent on Crete for a quote. The quotes were no better than what I could find online directly from Aegean.

Granted, it was a single travel agent, and since I didn't know anyone else, I booked everything online.

You made me curious, so I went to Olympic's online booking website to see if it made a difference there if you were ordering from Greece or the US. In September, a round-trip flight on Olympic to Chania on Crete if you are buying it in Greece is 155.61 Euros, and 214.70 Dollars if you are buying it in the US. Today's exchange rate on xe.com, shows that 155.61 Euros is only 192.88 Dollars, so looks like you would be saving a small amount of money if you purchased in Greece.

On Aegean, the roundtrip airfare to Chania on the same September day as the Olympic ticket mentioned above would be 122 Euros (this website does not distinguish between country of purchase). So looks like you save by flying on Aegean.

From the website, it doesn't look like Olympic flies to Santorini -- does it? Maybe I'm missing something. That may be the determinative factor for you on which airlines. Unless, of course, you are planning a ferry to Santorini!

Olympic's website is: http://www.olympicairlines.com/

Aegean's website is: http://www.aegeanair.com/aegeanen/home/

Interesting, Eleni. I've had the experience (I think) that Olympic's website gave a much cheaper fare than when I called them (in the US), but I guess this is a much more common phenomenon.

Olympic does fly to Santorini, I think -- I used them for Athens/Santorini last year. Doubt that would have changed. Maybe the destination is listed as Thira? I haven't checked the website.

Also, do the fares include taxes? Aegean doesn't add taxes to quotes until you're finally ready to buy. I forget what Olympic does.

111op, your question about taxes is a really good one. The Olympic site did include taxes. I went back to the Aegean site, and entered the name and other data that they requested to get to the credit card screen, and with taxes, the Aegean ticket was 162.71 Euros. So now, comparing apples to apples, it looks like Olympic is cheaper!

And yes, Olympic does fly to Santorini -- I went back and double checked and its listed under "Thira". The round-trip airfare on Olympic to Thira on a Greek-purchased ticket is 173.61 Euros.

Thanks Eleni. I would have done all this, but since I just went to Greece and did all the booking, I couldn't bear to do this again. :-)

I always find it sneaky that some airline websites don't price in taxes right away.

Two things I noticed when I bought my tickets:

1. If you're flying to a Greek island from somewhere in Europe (in my case, London to Mykonos), it can be cheaper to buy the whole ticket on Olympic rather than buy London to Athens on Olympic and Athens to Mykonos on Aegean, say.

2. If you're flying from island to island and must connect through Athens, it can be cheaper to buy this on Olympic for the same reason. I seem to have to buy a ticket like this with two separate segments on Aegean on the website. But I suppose you can try calling Aegean directly to see what the price they provide is on the phone.

I have to admit that I fly Olympic 90% of the time based on their usually better prices.

I just got back from a two week honeymoon in Greece where we flew Olympic airlines 3 times - Athens to Santorini; Santorini/Athens to Mykonos; Mykonos to Athens. EVERY flight that we had (4 of them) was late at least 45 minutes. Our Santorini to Athens flight was two hours late which caused us to miss our connecting flight to Mykonos (we had to wait for 4 hours until the next flight). I would say 90% of the Olympic flights that we saw were late while we never saw a late flight on Aegean.

Aegean, definitely. We just returned from our honeymoon and we flew both. The Olympic planes were all prop-planes and not very nice. They were loud and shabby- eveything rattled. Also, as Ann just said in her post- they were always late. On our trip, we had 3 Olympic flights and they were all at least an hour late. We had one Aegean flight, and it was right on time (even arrived early at our destination). Also, their planes are jets and much newer and faster than the Olympic planes were. Our Aegean flight was so nice and easy, we were sorry we didn't use them for all of our flights. One problem: the reason we didn't use them for all of our flights was because of their limited schedule. In all cases but one, Olympic offered flights at better times of day than Aegean for our tastes (we didn't want early morning flights on our honeymoon, but also didn't want to arrive after dark at our next island, but Aegean only seemed to have flights in the early morning or the evening). For that reason, we booked Olympic flights at 10:00am and 1:30pm instead of Aegean flights at 7:00am or 7:00pm.

FOR SURE DON"T FLY OLYMPIC. They lost our luggage not once but TWICE and we still don't have it. We're out $3000 bucks and they give us the run around every time we call.