GERMANY: Germania To Add More Flights To Greece In 2018

German carrier Germania has revised its flight program for summer 2018 and will operate more frequent flights from Dusseldorf to Greece.

The new destinations include the Greek islands of Crete, Karpathos, Kos, Lesvos, Rhodes and Zakynthos. Additionally, the number of connections to the island of Samos will be increased to two per week.

In 2018 Germania will also operate a new twice weekly service from Dresden to Athens. Moreover, in 2018 the airline will launch flights from Germany to Thessaloniki and Corfu.

Germania already operates seasonal direct flights from the German cities of Bremen and Nuremberg to Athens and also offers service to select Greek islands through a codeshare agreement with Greek airline Sky Express.

Top Kinissis Hellas is the General Sales Agent (GSA) of Germania in Greece.

New flights to Canary Islands and Portugal

Germania also announced that in 2018 it will fly to the Canary Islands of Fuerteventura, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote, La Palma and Tenerife. Also new to the airline’s schedule are the Portuguese destinations Faro on the Atlantic coast and Ponta Delgada at the Azores.

Also, in 2018 two flights a week twill continue to take off from Germany to Paphos in Cyprus.

Germania’s 2018 winter schedule also includes four flights a week for Tel Aviv.

In efforts to meet demand from the Turkish community in Germany, Germania offers an extensive choice of flights to Turkey.

The destination airports include Edremit, Alanya/Gazipasa, Hatay and Zonguldak. A new addition is Kütahya/Zafer, while the flights to Malatya are being increased.



Tourism Observer

TURKEY: German Tourists Avoiding Turkey, Why?

Summer bookings to Turkey by German holidaymakers are down by more than half after a spate of bombings, with tourists instead heading to Greece and Egypt, according to German market researcher GfK.

Tourism, which adds about $30 billion to Turkey's gross domestic product each year, has been hammered by attacks blamed on Islamic State and Kurdish militants that have scared away tourists over the past year. Summer bookings from Germany were down 58 percent at the end of January from a year ago.

"Greece is clearly benefiting from that, and Egypt as well," Doerte Nordbeck, head of Travel & Logistics Germany at GfK, told journalists at a news conference ahead of the world's biggest travel fair in Berlin (ITB) next week.

Germans' summer bookings for Greece were 67 percent higher than a year ago by the end of January, and the country has now replaced Turkey as Germans' second-most popular holiday destination after the Balearic islands, she said, citing booking data from travel agencies and online portals.

Tour operator TUI had said in January that it had added around 40 percent more capacity on the Greek islands of Crete, Rhodes and Kos to meet demand.

GfK said bookings for Egypt were up 91 percent from last year, but were still down 23 percent from before the 2011 uprising.
Norbert Fiebig, president of German travel association DRV said hotels in Turkey were responding by slashing their prices, while chains in Spain and Greece were taking advantage of rising demand to increase rates.

Booking portal Holidaycheck said this week that German bookings had shown hotel prices in Turkey were down 12 percent from a year ago and those in Egypt were still down by 8 percent. Prices in Greece were 5 percent higher than last year, it said.

With Germans booking earlier this year, DRV expects Germans' spending on travel bookings to grow moderately, after increasing by 2 percent to 59.8 billion euros ($63 billion), excluding expenses made during their trips, in 2016.

Germany is the world's third-largest spender on foreign travel behind China and the United States.

GREECE: Creation Of Videos For Targeted Promotion Of Tourism

Alternate Tourism Minister Elena Kountoura in an interview with Praktorio 104.9 FM on Friday spoke of the coordinated efforts made to improve the climate on the islands that received the largest number of refugees and expressed her satisfaction over the latest data.

Kountoura underlined that the refugee issue is a European one and stressed that Greece has done its best on its part. "We hosted refugees temporarily in places fully controlled and away from tourist areas" and "we are proud because we sent messages of humanity and solidarity while at the same time we stood up to the challenge," she said.

The minister also noted that there was concern over the islands that received the largest number of refugees "because the refugee flows on these islands did not leave much room for supporting them," but she added that when the flows were reduced "we managed to change the climate so that the islands have the fewer possible losses."

Kountoura also referred to the programme of Samos, Lesvos, Chios, Kos and Leros, the islands most affected by the refugee crisis last year, to slash prices for rooms and tourist packages by up to 50 percent for Greek tourists who will visit from August 20 until the end of October, in a bid to reverse a large drop in tourism arrivals on these islands.

She also talked about the cooperation with the Athens-Macedonian News Agency and the creation of videos for the targeted promotion of tourism product abroad.

GERMANY: Intersky And Minoan Air Stop Flying

Two European regional airlines have stopped flying this week as the summer peak demand turns into winter over supply of flights.

Intersky the German carrier, which flew domestic scheduled services from Friedrichshafen Airport to Cologne/Bonn, Dusseldorf, Berlin Tegel and Hamburg Fuhlsbühl and international flights from Zurich to Graz and Salzburg has decided to call it a day and grounded its fleet of two ATR72-600s and three Dash 8-300s

In a similar story, Minoan Air based in Heraklion in Greece, has suspended operations but hopefully this is only temporary with its fleet of four four Fokker 50s aircraft which had operated scheduled services between Athens, Heraklion, Alexandroupolis, Rhodes, Thessaloniki, Kos, Mytilene, Mykonos, and Santorini grounded for the timebeing pending a corporate reorganisation.

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TURKEY: Another Drowned Kid Found On Turkish Beach

Refugees pray on a highway In Turkey

A four-year-old Syrian girl's body has washed up on a beach in western Turkey, state media says, just weeks after images of drowned Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi shook the world.

The yet-to-be identified girl was found lifeless on a beach in the Aegean town of Cesme in Izmir province after a boat carrying 15 Syrians to the Greek island of Chios sank.

It said the Turkish coast guard rescued the remaining 14 Syrians, including eight children, from the inflatable boat. The girl appeared to be the only casualty.

Harrowing pictures of three-year-old Syrian asylum seeker Aylan, whose body was found washed up on a Turkish beach after the boat carrying his family to the Greek island of Kos sank, caused an outpouring of emotion around the world.

The response pressured European leaders to step up their response to the migrant crisis.

But two weeks later EU members are still at odds over how to accommodate the tens of thousands of new arrivals.

Turkish deputy prime minister Numan Kurtulmus said on Friday the Turkish coast guard had rescued over 53,000 asylum seekers from stricken boats since the beginning of the year.

He said around 274 asylum seekers had lost their lives in Turkish waters this year seeking to leave the country by sea for Greece.

In another recent tragedy, 22 people who had left Turkey drowned on Tuesday when their wooden boat sank off Kos.

Asylum seekers have in recent days turned to Turkey's land borders with Greece and Bulgaria to avoid the sea voyage that has cost over 2,600 people their lives in the Mediterranean this year.

Several hundred asylum seekers spent a third day camped in and around the Turkish border city of Edirne, which lies 10 kilometres from the Greek border and is being promoted on social media as a safer route out of Turkey than sea journey in overcrowded dinghies.

Under an "open-door" policy championed by president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey has taken in 2.2 million Syrian asylum seekers since the conflict in Syria erupted in 2011.

Mr Kurtulmus said Turkey has so far spent almost $11 billion (6 billion euros) to provide for Syrian refugees.

International Organisation of Immigration says a record 473,887 asylum seekers crossed into Europe

A record 473,887 asylum seekers have crossed the Mediterranean to Europe so far this year, the International Organisation for Migration said on Friday, including at least 182,000 Syrians — almost 40 per cent of the total.

The total represents an increase of almost 9,000 from the total the Geneva-based agency gave on Tuesday. But the rate of increase has slowed.

On Tuesday, the IOM said the number of crossings had jumped by more than 32,000 since the previous Friday.

The EU's Eurostat statistics agency said the EU received 213,000 asylum applications from April to June this year, a jump of 85 per cent from the same period in 2014, with over one third coming from Syria or Afghanistan.

It said Germany had the highest number of new applicants, with more than a third of the total for the EU, while Hungary was the country that received the most asylum applications relative to its population size.

Applications from Kosovo, regarded as a "safe" country by most of the EU, dropped sharply in the period, from the top berth with 50,000 requests in the first quarter to just over 10,000 one quarter later.

Across the EU almost 600,000 applications were pending at the end of June, Eurostat said, with 52 per cent of those being processed in Germany.

The European Union must know that Croatia will not become a migrant 'hotspot'. We have hearts, but we also have head.Croatia's prime minister, Zoran Milanovi

Croatia said it cannot and would not accept the burden of thousands of asylum seekers any longer, nor register or accommodate them.

Faced with an influx of more than 13,000 migrants in just over two days, prime minister Zoran Milanovic said on Friday he had called a session of Croatia's National Security Council and that it was time to deal with the problem in a different way

"We cannot register and accommodate these people any longer," he told a news conference.

"They will get food, water and medical help, and then they can move on. The European Union must know that Croatia will not become a migrant 'hotspot'. We have hearts, but we also have heads."

In response, Slovenia accused Croatia on of breaking the rules of the EU and the Schengen zone of border-free travel.

Interior ministry state secretary Bostjan Sefic said Slovenia expected around 1,000 asylum seekers to cross from Croatia in the next 24 hours.

Meanwhile, Dutch prosecutors said on Friday they had arrested two Syrians suspected of operating a large people-smuggling ring that brought hundreds of Syrian refugees into Europe.

Following a year-long investigation, Dutch authorities arrested a 35-year-old Syrian man living in the southern city of Eindhoven as well as his 26-year-old cousin.

Europol, Europe's police agency, is tracking as many as 30,000 suspected people smugglers who are taking advantage of large flows into the continent of asylum seekers escaping conflict in the Middle East and Africa.
Vatican takes in first Syrian refugee family

Responding to a call from Pope Francis for every Church parish to house refugees, the Vatican City said on Friday it had taken in a family that had fled the war in Syria.

The family — a father, mother and their two children — came from Damascus and are Melkite Greek Catholics, a Christian church with close ties to the Roman Catholic Church.

The Vatican said in a statement the family, which was not named, arrived in Italy on September 6, the day Pope Francis made his appeal for European parishes to open their doors to refugees. The four Syrians have since asked for asylum.
Journey in search of a better life

In a special report, ABC correspondents Mary Gearin, Barbara Miller and Sophie McNeill follow some asylum seekers on their long path through Europe.

"According to the law, for the first six months following the request for asylum those seeking international protection cannot work," the Vatican said.

"During this time, they will be helped and accompanied by the Parish of Santa Anna."

The Vatican City, a micro state which sits in the heart of Rome, contains two parishes — Santa Anna and St. Peter's Basilica.

The Vatican said it could not yet provide any information about a second family that is expected to be housed by the St Peter's administration.

Some parishioners have been openly hostile to the idea of welcoming in Muslims.

Monks in a village in Slovakia had to withdraw an offer to house Christian Syrian refugees after locals baulked at the idea.

The vast majority of Syrians are Muslims, but its small Christian community is one of the oldest in the world, making up an estimated 10 per cent of the population before the outbreak of the Syrian unrest in 2011.

According to its website, the Melkite Greek Catholic Church had some 150,000 members in Damascus in 2010. It is not clear how many have stayed in the city.