ATHENS- Already being investigated over canceled flights and financial woes, Greece’s regional airline Astra Airways suffered what could be the end after the International Air Transport Association (IATA) warned warned Greek travel agents to stop selling tickets on the airline immediately.
That effectively means, said Simple Flying which was reporting on the company’s troubles, that IATA has taken the airline off the market, with the Greek news agency Voria, IATA contacted travel agencies who belonged to their Greece BSP office with the stop ticketing order.
This included not accepting bookings, no longer issuing tickets and removing the codes used by the airline from their systems.
The President of the Association of Tourist Agencies in Macedonia-Thrace, Viron Theologi, told Voria that this means service could be affected for islands connecting to Athens and Thessaloniki via Astra and with no ferries to those destinations they could be cut off.
Most of Astra’s tickets are sold through Greek travel agencies and even if it stays open it needs to reconnect with IATA from the start in order to get bookings on its services.
The move comes after the company issued a statement informing the public that it was examining requests to pay back people whose flights were canceled. “We apologize for the inconvenience caused and are working for the smooth and orderly continuation of our flights,” it added.
Simple Flying said Astra was looking for investors to save itself and that Aegean Airlines for now will add 306 flights of 28,476 seats to remote islands and add services to others such as Chios, Samos, Kos, Heraklion on Crete, and Mytilene through May 24, 2020 so far.
source: thenationalherald.com
