What Airlines Fly from America to Athens in Winter?

Also, does Newark count?

“Toto, where the hell are we?” An airport lounge somewhere. Photo: Anthony Grant

Wintertime and the leaving is easy — or is it? Despite various European countries’ much-ballyhooed promises of “winter is the new summer” and the mainstream travel media (or what’s left of it) largely getting behind this interesting fiction, Americans’ options for traveling to most major cities on the Continent are significantly reduced this time of year. London and Paris and Frankfurt being the three obvious exceptions.

How about getting to southern European capitals in particular, like Rome and Athens? Well, that’s generally going to take more work in the winter months. For example, Delta is still offering non-stop flights between New York’s JFK and Athens in the beginning of January, but by February you’ll have to stop in frigid Amsterdam first. And winter is the new summer in Europe, really TikTok? Because you can forget about all those sexy summertime non-stops between the East Coast and places like Palma de Mallorca. Dream on!

As for the West Coast, it is still grossly underserved; for some bizarre (or bazaar?) reason, there are Turkish Airlines flights from LAX to Istanbul, but there is no legacy carrier that connects either Los Angeles or San Francisco to Athens. Furthermore, we don’t know a single Californian who has flown Turkish Airlines from LAX — or a single Californian who would in good conscience choose to vacation in Turkey over, say, Greece, Italy, or Spain.

To Athens for weekend brunch? In wintertime, not so easy from America.

Nothing against today’s strange not-in-a-good-way Turkey (except for those truly distorting television ads and the way they’ve bought off flake-news CNN’s Central Park-creepy Richard Quest), but truly nothing “for” it either.

Back to Athens, or rather back getting to Athens from the United States in winter, or tryin’ to, anyway. United travelers, it seems, would have to stop in Munich en route to Athens, at least until springtime comes around. Hmm.

Emirates offers year-round non-stop flights from Newark to Athens but, does anybody really want to fly out of Newark these days? We don’t: not only do they have persistent air traffic control issues (even before the government shutdown), but the last time we were there we found the terminals to be dirty. Seems the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ) manages to pay their executives pretty good, but can’t afford an extra broom.

American Airlines doesn’t seem to have any non-stops to Athens this time of year. Also, we categorically refuse to fly American Airlines regardless of country or continent — hard to think of any other airline in the country or world that treats its customers with such brazen disrespect — and friends, we’ve flown Aeroflot, so that’s sayin’ something.

You could fly El Al non-stop to Tel Aviv and from there make the short hop west to Athens on either the Israeli flag carrier or with Aegean, but Tel Aviv’s airport is not the most user-friendly, particularly for the uninitiated.

So that’s about it! Oh, there’s ITA Italian Airways — if you can stomach Rome’s stuffy, awful, overcrowded, rudely-staffed airport, you could take a non-stop from New York’s JFK to Rome and then an E-Z connection to Athens.