Had a chance to fly to and from the Athens airport, coming in on KLM and flying out with Lufthansa. It is a nice airport. Not having had time to eat breakfast, I particularly liked that the even at the downstairs bus gates there were kiosks with warm food on offer. Usually those kinds of gates are void of any services. Well done.
I was a bit worried coming in to the airport that I'd have a problem with my ticket - my second name was wrong in the ticket. Turned out that no one batted one eyelid on this, so had no problem. Good.
At the Athens airport one can see many different airlines, e.g., this one from the training airlines:
Flying out I had a Lufthansa A321, the D-AISD. It looked so shiny that I wanted to know if I was on its first few flights. How wrong I was, though. The plane is from year 2000, 25 and half years old. I guess it must have been at a paint shop recently. Great that Lufthansa takes good care of their planes!
The Athens airport official name is Athens International Airport Eleftherios Venizelos, or briefly just Athens International Airport. The airport code is ATH. It is technically not in Athens, but in a city called Spata. The airport homepage is here, and the Wikipedia article here.
It is fortunate that the airport has a direct rail link to the most commonly used ferry port to the islands, the Piraeus port. It is one of the largest ports in Europe, a massive facility. Getting to the airport from the port does take more than an hour even with the fastest direct trains, and slightly less than an hour by taxi. But it can be difficult to get to early or even afternoon flights from the islands, depending on ferry schedules.
When I landed at the Helsinki-Vantaa airport, it was emptier than I had ever seen it. Literally no one else at the airport:
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This article was originally published in the Planetskier Blogspot article series.
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