TG suspends Athens service
November 4, 2011 by Rapeepat Mantanarat
Filed under Aviation, News
BANGKOK, 4 November 2011 – Thai Airways International will suspend its three-weekly service to Athens from mid-November due to poor performance.
After flying to Athens for 35 years since 1976, the airline will withdraw the service 17 November.
The airline is offering alternatives such as code-share with alliance partners, but it ends the nonstop option from Athens.
Code-share and interline options include a service to Cairo on Egypt Air or to Istanbul on Turkish Airlines that connects with Olympic Air to Athens. Another option is to fly THAI to Paris or London and connect with an Aegean Airlines’ service to Athens.
There are a variety of choices in the market for services to Athens from Bangkok, all one stop to Athens. They include Lufthansa, Singapore Airlines, Air China, Emirates, Qatar Airways, Etihad Airways, Swiss Air Line International, Turkish Airlines, Egypt Air, SAS, British Airways, Gulf Air, Austrian Airlines, Air France and KLM.
Greece’s economy, in recession since 2009, has seen a drop in consumer spending on travel.
In 2010, the Immigration Bureau recorded 18,483 Greeks travelling to Thailand, down 3% from 2009. However, the statistics of the Immigration Bureau on Thai outbound tourists has not individual data for travel to Greece alone.
Vocabulary
suspend = temporarily halt
terminate = halt
The crucial word this report evidently needs, judging from most of the content, is “terminate”, not “suspend”.
But TTR is far from alone in not knowing the meaning of “suspend”. You have plenty of company throughout the media, whose linguistic geniuses are very fond of saying “temporarily suspend”, i.e. “temporarily temporarily halt”.