Mr. George Athanassiou, Alitalia’s Country Manager for Greece, Israel, Cyprus and Malta, and his Team welcomed partners to a delightful Cocktail Reception entitled “Summer Winter Breeze” on Friday 27 September. The event took place in the Living Room Terrace garden of the fabulous new Four Seasons Astir Palace Hotel in Athens. Alitalia executives and personnel, industry professionals, travel agents and members of the press gathered at the exclusive venue for an evening of business networking, social mingling and entertainment.
Guests were invited to enjoy an authentic Italian “Aperi-cena” prepared by Four Season’s Italian chef while having the spectacular sea view as their backdrop, with delicious Italian gourmet delicacies, cocktails, Prosecco, wine and chill-out music adding to the magic of the evening.
Mr. George Athanassiou addressed the guests about this season’s exciting news and developments. He announced the restart of operations of the Alitalia tropical winter routes at the end of October to the Maldives, Mauritius and Havana with excellent connectivity from Athens via Rome Fiumicino airport, without also forgetting the existing ongoing year-round routes to Miami, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Johannesburg, Santiago De Chile and so on.
Mr. Athanassiou stressed that after a very successful 2018/2019, we gathered to emphasize on these re-starting operations to Malé in the Maldives with 4 weekly flights and flights both from Rome Fiumicino and Milan Malpensa, to Mauritius with 3 weekly flights and Havana with 2 flights per week.
He also pointed out that after the Italian home market, the Greek market is amongst the top-5 contributing markets in terms of sales contribution in the whole Alitalia’s network, and especially for the Rome-Havana route is the 1st contributing market after Italy, which is an encouraging fact that shows the market’s high preference for our services.
The Manager of Alitalia for Greece also went on to pre-announce the implementation of Alitalia’s new B2B platform known as “Alitalia Connect”, in which partners will be able to keep up with all Alitalia’s news and performance, as well as being able to make real-time ad hoc group bookings. He also revealed that Alitalia exceeded the 400K passengers departing from Athens in 2018 and that by August 2019 enjoyed a progressive increase of approximately +7% compared to the previous year (not including the seasonal flights that Alitalia operates to/from Rhodes, Heraklion, Mykonos, Thessaloniki etc.).
Finally, Mr. Athanassiou stressed that the Cocktail Reception was organized in collaboration with Athens International Airport (AIA), which has earned a total of 18 international awards of excellence since first beginning operations, amongst them Best European Airport (in the 20 million passengers category).
The Cocktail Reception was enjoyed by all, with flavours and aromas of Italy carefully prepared by the Italian chef and his team enjoyed amidst breathtaking surroundings, as well as classic cocktails being served throughout the night. Guests had the chance to take cool “Panoramic selfies” for their social media feed and they also departed with a special branded aromatic gift.
