Macedonian Airlines is a subsidiary of OA, operated by OA aircraft and crew. There really is no difference between them and the mainline carrier. Carl, there is an enormous amount of Greeks in Australia, at least a million from what I’ve been told. Believe me when I say, Olympic could have the worst service in the world, and the Greeks will fly them over Singapore, Thai and Emirates, just because its Olympic. The new ATH is wonderful! Very nice facilities, good shops, very clean, and decent security, unlike the old ATH, which was a $hithole in every sense of the word. As far as the Olympics go, Carl, they will NEVER BE READY. The road that connects ATH with downtown, is about 5 miles long, if that. They’ve made no progress whatsoever, since I was there in ’01, 3 months after the new airport opened. Everything else is a mess. I sincerely hope the Olympic committee wakes up, and awards the games to L.A., which has all the facilities to accomodate the games at moments’ notice (not to mention they were the last games to actually make a profit). You mention the metro, that is the only thing that is ACTUALLY READY. All those years, there was only one line. Now, they have 3, and the 2 new lines are very nice. As far as transportation goes, you can take the bus from 2 stations (Ethniki Amina and Syntagma) and only costs 2.5 Euros (has to be the cheapest in Europe). The metro goes from Piraeas with a switch to any of those stations. In fact, the same ticket covers the train and the bus. Lastly, I don’t think reducing the amount of long haul routes is the answer. Olympics long haul routes are always full, because as I mentioned before, the cities they serve on the long haul cater to a large Greek population and they’ll fly Olympic regardless of the service. What needs to be done is eliminating lots of ‘the brass.’ Right now, they probably have 10 people where they only need 1. That’s the majority of the problem.
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