AEGEAN responds to criticism relating to hotel bookings made via its website by Booking.com

AEGEAN would like to inform the public concerning the appearance of the international hotel booking website Booking.com on its own web page.

More specifically, among the 481 Cypriot hotels available for booking on the Booking.com search engine, used by Aegean, there are unfortunately three hotels located in the occupied part of the island. It is worth noting that the same Booking.com website has its own independent presence, with millions of bookings, and collaborations with dozens of other airlines. It is clear, therefore, that neither AEGEAN nor its other users can determine the content of the Booking.com site.

In order to resolve the problem, which was identified in a letter to all the airline companies, users of Hermes Airports (HERMES 17 /5 /2012), AEGEAN 25 days ago undertook the initiative of developing together with Booking.com a differentiated technical solution so that no hotels from the region in question would appear on the AEGEAN site.

While preparations for this solution are under way, we took the decision - instead of excluding all Cypriot hotels and seeing them lose valuable bookings during this time of crisis - to continue allowing the three aforesaid hotels to appear. It should be noted that the hotels in question are included on the permitted list issued by the Cyprus Ministry of Foreign Affairs and supplied to us.

If this decision we have taken on interim action was a mistake, then we offer our sincere apologies.

In any event, the new technical solution will be put in place by the end of the week at the latest, and the problem will have been resolved.

We are surprised and concerned at the way AEGEAN has been singled out for criticism for its use of a tool shared with many other airlines doing business in Cyprus.

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