DOZENS of prospective travellers hoping to secure cheap tickets on offer to any one of six destinations on Cyprus Airways’ flight route yesterday patiently queued for almost an hour at the airline’s Nicosia offices.
The offer, which started on Thursday and ends on Tuesday, is offering 60,000 £60 return airline tickets to Athens, Salonica, Heraklion, Rhodes, Bucharest and Sofia from now until December 31.
Twenty seats at the special rate have been made available on each flight every day.
Bookings were available online, via telephone, through a travel agent, and directly from the airline’s offices, a Cyprus Airways customer service officer told the Cyprus Mail.
“This morning when we came to work, there were already 30 people here. More and more people keep coming,” she said, glancing at yet another person joining the queue at 12.15pm.
The woman was only one of four customer service staff dealing with the long line of people waiting to be served. Although clearly overworked, the four remained pleasant and co-operative.
By midday yesterday, the majority of tickets had been snapped up, she said.
“The summer is pretty much fully booked, as is Christmas. September is also almost full, so we’re looking at October and November now,” she said.
The most sought after destinations were Athens and Salonica, she added.
Flights to the Bulgarian capital were also fully booked for weekend summer trips, with only Wednesday available for flights out of Cyprus.
“We’re just so busy, it’s been non-stop since this morning. I had someone call me up at home last night to book a ticket for her today. I haven’t even had time to book one for myself,” she said.
Egli Savva, 40, who had been queuing for an hour, managed to purchase four tickets.
She will be flying to Athens in October for three days, and a week later booked a surprise trip for her mother to Heraklion to visit her other daughter.
“It’ll be an early Christmas present,” she said.
Savva, who had been queuing to pay for a ticket booked before the offer was announced, had thought she wouldn’t find any of the special offer tickets.
Speaking to the Mail minutes before being told tickets were still available, she said: “I think they should have two desks. One for people who want to get one of the offer tickets and one for people who want normal tickets.”
Despo Kanellou, 65, was another traveller forced to queue to pick up a pre-booked ticket.
“Today is the deadline to pick up my ticket. Normally I only have to queue five to 10 minutes but today I’ve been waiting 45 minutes,” she said.
Kanellou said if she could have, she’d have come back another day.
“I had no choice because today was the deadline to pay for my ticket and it would’ve been cancelled otherwise.”
Instead of £60, she said her ticket to Athens and Salonica had cost £128.
“I missed out on the offer by a day,” she said.
George Shippis, 42, said he’d been waiting almost an hour but that if he found the three tickets he wanted for his family trip to Greece this summer the wait would have been worthwhile.
“I’m hoping to find available tickets on offer. If I don’t, which I think I probably won’t, then I’ll buy them at the normal rate.”
Unlike Shippis, 40-year-old Margarita Clerides said if she did not find any special offer tickets she wouldn’t be travelling. The woman said she’d been queuing for almost an hour to get two tickets to Sofia and another to any destination on offer in Greece.
“I tried ringing yesterday but was put in a queue 10 minutes and no one ever got back to me. This morning I tried again and the line was continually engaged,” she said.
Katia Constandinou had better luck.
The 27-year-old called Cyprus Airways on Thursday and made a reservation for a special rate ticket to Salonica which she’d dropped by to pick up.
The young woman didn’t seem bothered to have been kept waiting believing it was par for the course.
“When there are offers like this I think it’s normal to have long queues,” she said.
