The OnBoard Courier for Greece

After it come Heraklion (HER) with 112 destinations and about 149.8 departures a day, Rodes Island (RHO) with 117 destinations and about 134.1 departures a day, Thessaloniki (SKG) with 101 destinations and about 116.3 departures a day, Kerkyra Island (CFU) with 102 destinations and about 96.9 departures a day and Kos Island (KGS) with 72 destinations and about 62.9 departures a day. Those are the alternates. When the primary gateway is shut by weather, a strike or a curfew, they are what a courier is rebooked through. Between them the 6 airports in Greece that publish departures schedule about 1,031.8 movements a day and reach 676 separate destinations, counting each city once per airport.

Reach matters more than frequency for a hand carry, because a courier flies whatever is leaving. From ATH alone, 1,531 airports are reachable with exactly one change, on top of the 172 served nonstop. That is a normal spread for a well connected gateway, and it means a routing exists for most requests without waiting for a specific weekly service. It is computed from the scheduled network rather than from a booking engine.

24 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 38 domestic destinations. That matters on a hand carry because it decides whether the last leg can be flown or has to be driven. A consignee outside the gateway city is then a connecting flight, not a four hour drive.

Outside its own borders the country is tied most closely to Germany, about 141.8 flights a day, the United Kingdom, about 109.3 flights a day, Italy, about 64.8 flights a day, France, about 48.5 flights a day and Israel, about 46 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from Greece without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from Greece to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

102 airlines fly out of Greece in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to Aegean Airlines on 194 routes, Ryanair on 150 routes, easyJet on 75 routes, Sky Express on 66 routes and Jet2 on 57 routes. The carrier matters to a hand carry more than it does to freight, because cabin baggage rules, what counts as an acceptable carry on item and whether an extra seat can be bought are set by the airline and not by the airport.

The longest single sector out of ATH in this data runs to Dallas-Fort Worth, United States (DFW), 10,052 km by great circle. Great circle is not a flown distance and will read short against a real routing, but it is the honest way to state a reach: it says what one aircraft does without stopping, which is exactly the question a courier desk is asking.

From the Emirates, Greece is reached nonstop. The network file records 3 such pairs, of which 2 run often enough to plan around: Dubai to Athens (ATH), about 2.3 a day on Emirates and Dubai to Mykonos Island (JMK), about 0.7 a day on flydubai. More than one nonstop pair means more than one chance to travel on the day the consignment is ready, which is worth more on this kind of work than any single fast flight.

The carriers on those sectors are Emirates and flydubai. With this few, the desk knows all of their cabin rules by heart, which is the difference between quoting in fifteen minutes and quoting after a phone call.

Counting what is already published, this site holds 2 standalone city pages, 6 Atlas entries, 2 airport pages and 3 lane pages for Greece, and every one of them is linked from this page. That is the point of a country index: the material exists, it was written one page at a time, and until now there was no single place that connected it.

Alongside the reference material there is the country desk page, the travel and connections page and the courier recruitment page for people who already fly this market. The coverage here is thin, and saying so is more useful than padding it. What exists is accurate; what is missing is missing because nothing on this desk has been written about it yet.