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Olympic Holidays secures airline for summer flights

Olympic Holidays has vowed to run its full summer programme after sourcing flights from Australian-based charter carrier Strategic Airlines.


The eastern Mediterranean specialist lost a significant proportion of its flying after negotiations with charter carrier Monarch Airlines broke down at the end of last year.


After what are understood to be protracted negotiations, Monarch informed trade partners that it would no longer be working with Olympic and insisted the operator removed any references to the airline from its website.


However, Photis Lambrianides, commercial director at Olympic, said any difficulties sourcing airlift had been resolved.


“It has all been sorted out, we’ll be running our summer 2011 programme in full force,” he told Travel Weekly. “The core of our programme is with a charter airline called Strategic. First Choice and Thomas Cook used it last year for some of their routes. It has two aircraft based in the UK.


“We will be working aggressively with the trade and setting up deals with agents and consortia.”


Lambrianides said the operator was also using flights from Thomas Cook, Thomson Airways and Jet2.com, and that its summer programme would be a “similar size” to last year.


The Monarch Group is understood to have absorbed all of Olympic’s 2011 Greece flying into its own tour operator programmes, which is estimated to be about 250,000 seats. Olympic is one of a handful of large Greece specialist operators left following the collapses of Goldtrail in 2010 and Libra and Argo in 2009.

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