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While under the management of Speedwing, Olympic Airways lost one of its Athens slots. What happened to it? Was it fairly reallocated?

Noel Josephides

I was asked by a friend to make a reservation for him to Athens in November.

For some reason your friends always think they can trust you to make the reservations better than anyone else in the office.

In fact, I’m the least competent and the last person anyone should ask to actually use a computer.

Anyway, I confidently told him I would book him on the good old Olympic Airways OA260 leaving Heathrow at 11.30am. This flight has existed ever since I’ve been in travel, which is about 30 years.

But, I just could not find it. All I kept getting was the 12.10pm British Airways flight to Athens.

I telephoned Olympic to ask what had happened to the OA260, its flagship flight, and was told that, when Olympic was under the management of Speedwing, the British Airways subsidiary, it had decided to do away with the OA260 slot in favour of an very early-morning slot.

Have you ever tried to get to Heathrow for a 6.30am departure? I can assure you it’s not easy.

Nevertheless, the change was made and Olympic was forced to give up its historic schedule which probably accounted for 65% of its revenue from the UK. Apparently, the decision to axe the OA260 was not very popular with many executives at Olympic.

But, Speedwing was running the show and the new Athens schedules very much favoured British Airways.

Well, what happened to the Olympic slot? Shortly after the airlines relinquished its rights, a flight on Qantas (codeshared with British Airways) to Sydney appeared at exactly the same time. Did the slot go back into a pool or was it just given? Olympic would now love to know. In fact, the Qantas flight has apparently now moved to about 15 minutes earlier in order to avoid any misunderstanding.

Olympic has been trying to get its time back but, so far, to no avail.

The airline considers itself to have grandfather rights to this slot and that the slot was lost when a BA subsidiary was in charge of the airline.

It feels that what was rightly theirs should be returned.

The fact is that, on the London to Athens route, Olympic Airways has been left substantially weakened vis-à-vis British Airways who now arguably have the best timings out of Heathrow.

Many of us tour operators are now also going through an anxious time waiting to hear whether the airlines we shall be using next year get slots out of Gatwick approved.

We are all also waiting to read the consultation paper, dealing with the whole slot issue, which should shortly be coming out of Brussels.

There must be a fairer way of dealing with the allocation of slots.

Incumbent airlines that do not legitimately use all their slots should not be allowed to keep them or ask other airlines to babysit them.

If the allocation of slots was freed up, competition among airlines would be far keener and far better use would be made of what was available.

Here, as in everything else, being small is a distinct disadvantage.

We are always left to pick up the crumbs from the big companies’ tables, even though very often, by virtue of being smaller, we actually do a much better job.

“We are always left to pick up the crumbs from the big companies’ tables”