However, there are indications that Apollo will be able to bring home up to 10,000 Scandinavian guests from Albania, Cyprus, Greece, Croatia and Turkey over the weekend, Check-in.dk reported.
This is due to the striking SAS pilots agreeing to break their strike to fly stranded tourists back to Scandinavia on the proviso that no more new guests were sent abroad.
Several holidaymakers should therefore be able to return home over the weekend with SAS operating 26 flights to 11 Norwegian airports, 14 flights to Stockholm and Gothenburg and six flights to Copenhagen.
But there are still as many as 2,500 Apollo guests who are potentially stuck abroad as their SAS flights have been cancelled.
Specifically, eight flights to Copenhagen have been cancelled from Chania (Western Crete), Gazipasa-Alanya, Karphatos, Larnaca, Lesbos, Samos and Santorini as well as a single flight to Aalborg from Chania.
SAS has also cancelled two flights from Chania and Santorini to Gothenburg, while passengers on two charter flights from Corfu and Samos to Oslo and from Chania and Split to Trondheim will also need to find other flights.
There will therefore be many Danish, Swedish and Norwegian charter tourists on holiday in Greece, Turkey or Cyprus who will be affected by the strike this weekend.
Holidays cancelled for many
Although they have managed to arrange the return of many of their customers to Scandinavia this weekend, there is still a lot of frustration directed at Apollo.
Over 10,000 passengers have had to give up their planned summer holidays after a total of 61 charter flights with SAS from Scandinavia were cancelled this weekend.
Specifically, 30 flights from 11 airports in Norway, Oslo, Kristiansand, Stavanger, Haugesund, Bergen, Aalesund, Molde, Trondheim, Bodø, Evenes and Tromsø, respectively.
From Sweden, nine flights have been cancelled from Stockholm-Arlanda and seven from Gothenburg, while from Denmark, 14 Apollo flights have been cancelled from Copenhagen and one from Aalborg.
Writing on LinkedIn, Leif Vase Larsen, CEO of Apollo Rejser in the Nordics, has once again called on the parties to find a solution. “Enough is enough,” the Danish CEO said.
In March this year, SAS and Apollo signed an agreement on charter flights for the summer of 2022 to a value of around DKK 700 million.
According to the plan, there were to be flights from more than 20 airports in Scandinavia to over 30 destinations on the Mediterranean. The flights were scheduled to include some 150,000 passengers throughout the summer programme.
Around 1,000 SAS pilots from Denmark, Norway and Sweden went on strike on Monday after negotiations between them and SAS on wages and working conditions broke down. They have offered to break the strike to fly stranded passengers home.
The airline has said that each day that the strike continues, 30,000 passengers will be affected.
READ MORE:
Please whitelist us to continue reading.
Still no mention of Svalbard? SAS is the primary airline to get to and from here so there’s a lot of people stuck and unsure of how to get off the island.