– Just have to wait – VG
No one knows when Silje Utvei and hundreds of other Norwegian charter tourists will return home from Greece.
Silje Utvei and her cohabitant are among around 200 Norwegian tourists stranded on the Greek island of Samos.
Actually, they should have been home on Saturday, but Apollo mainly uses travel from SAS.
No one knows when they will finally come home.
– We get the same message every single day. We just have to wait and wait. Apollo pays with and stay, so it’s not a shame on us, but it’s very boring.
At home, the cohabitant’s children are waiting, in addition to cats, a dog and a house to be fixed during the holidays.
Initially, all 200 passengers will fly from Samos in a plane, but have been told that Apollo is also looking at other options.
– For us, it does not work that way. It seems like they’re just crossing their fingers that the strike is over tomorrow.
If they fix a return trip themselves without the help of Apollo, they have to pay for it themselves. They have been looking at an itinerary via Turkey.
– Then it’s a stopover by boat and everything. Only the plane ticket comes to 8000.
Rated bus from Greece
Lack of aircraft in Europe makes it more difficult to charter own aircraft. Apollo estimates that just under 1,000 people are still stranded on the Greek eyes of Crete, Corfu and Samos – a total of four full charter flights.
– I can not say a specific time when we get this home. That is what makes the situation so frustrating and difficult both for judgment and for us. We simply do not know when we will get a plane, says communications manager Beatriz Rivera in Apollo.
She says they are looking for all sorts of solutions.
– We have been desperate enough to come up with the idea of the bus home from Greece to get them home. It turned out to be difficult, because Europe also lacks buses.
On Sunday, the SAS pilot decided not to bring home more charter tourists, as they have previously had a dispensation to do.
Rivera in Apollo says that some of the customers in Greece have been flown to Copenhagen, and from there taken by bus to Oslo. Others have taken a boat to Corfu and flown from there. Sending passengers on overly extensive itineraries they would rather avoid.
– We are responsible for their entire itinerary home. We must try to do it in a way that we have an overview and get them home where they are going, without the immediate ones ending up in Germany and not moving on.
Sends passengers north
The charter company Ving is also struggling to provide aircraft for their customer who has been flown abroad by SAS.
– We are talking about a couple of thousand travelers a week. And it is almost impossible to find replacement aircraft for these passengers, Marie-Anne Zachrisson told NTB on Monday. She is head of Ving in Norway.
To VG, she says on Tuesday that they have managed to solve some of the returns.
– There are a few hundred numbers left that we do not have a solution for yet. My colleagues work day and night to find different solutions.
Zachrisson says that they focus on getting all passengers to the Nordics the way they do.
– Then we can try to get them on with, for example, buses and such solutions.