Mykonos has a track. It’s short, it sees heavy traffic in July and August, and the approach to the Aegean Sea in certain wind conditions is the kind that concentrates the mind. The island has been managing this situation for decades and the operation is professional. Which is not the case, in high season, is fast.
The commercial terminal of Mykonos Airport in August is an experience that I would not wish on most of my clients at Unique Concierge. It’s crowded in the same way that places become crowded when too many people want the same thing at the same time, and it moves at the pace that crowded places with limited infrastructure tend to move. If you’ve just crossed the Atlantic or come up from the Gulf and are about to spend a week in one of Europe’s most expensive destinations, standing in that terminal for ninety minutes is a special kind of indignity.
Private aviation solves this problem. This completely resolves it and resolves it in a way that sets the tone for the rest of the stay. You land, you are welcomed on the tarmac, your luggage goes directly into the vehicle, and fifteen minutes after landing you are in the car heading to the villa or hotel. The week starts correctly rather than in the departure queue.
I have been organizing private flights for clients coming to Mykonos and throughout Greece since 1999. What I have learned during this time is that the difference between a well organized private flight and a poorly organized flight is not the plane. The plane is the easy part.
The real complications Flying private seems simple until you start to understand the details.
Mykonos Airport has slot restrictions in summer. If your carrier doesn’t know this or doesn’t have an existing relationship with the processing agents who manage access to the slots, you’ll discover the problem at a time when it can’t be fixed. I have seen clients miss a close connection between a private charter and a yacht departure because the landing slot was not properly secured. This is the kind of thing that doesn’t appear in any brochure and isn’t mentioned by operators who have never worked at this airport before.
The route matters more than people think. Athens to Mykonos is forty minutes in a light aircraft, which seems ideal until you factor in aircraft positioning time, handling in Athens, approach to Mykonos, and time on the ground at both ends. For certain clients and certain schedules, a helicopter makes more sense. For others, arriving directly in Mykonos from an international departure point makes more sense than transiting through Athens. These are questions worth asking before booking, not after.
The handling agent in Mykonos is the person who actually controls what happens when you land. That your luggage is received, that the vehicle is correctly positioned, that customs are managed efficiently, that the transfer to your destination is coordinated with the flight. A good manipulator makes everything invisible. A bad relationship, or lack of a prior relationship with someone, produces the kind of arrival where things go slightly wrong in a way that takes fifteen minutes each to sort out.
Helicopters in particular Customers sometimes request helicopters as an alternative to fixed-wing aircraft for inter-island travel in Greece. The answer is that it depends entirely on what you’re trying to do.
For short transfers, a helicopter can be excellent. Athens to Mykonos in less than an hour, landing at a helipad near the hotel or villa, no airport at all. For some clients and some schedules, this is just fine. For others, it’s more complicated and more expensive than necessary.
What helicopters cannot do is operate in strong winds. Meltemi, which governs the Cyclades during the summer, grounds helicopters on bad days. A client who has planned a helicopter transfer and discovers at eleven in the morning that the wind has ended this option needs an alternative already planned. It’s not a difficult situation to deal with if you know it can happen. This is a very difficult situation to deal with if you haven’t thought about it at all.
What a concierge actually organizes When a client asks me to arrange a private flight to Mykonos, the conversation begins long before an operator is contacted.
First, the actual schedule. What do they connect from and is this connection flexible? Where do they go when they land, and does the timing of this next arrangement limit theft? A client arriving in Mykonos with a private charter, with a yacht departure at six p.m. and a thirty-minute transfer between the airport and marina, needs a landing slot that takes this into account. This seems obvious. In practice, it is often poorly organized by people who booked the flight without knowing what will follow.
Second, the operator. Not all private aviation operators have the processing relationships, access to slots and specific Aegean experience that make a flight to Mykonos run smoothly. I call on operators with whom I have worked for years, whose handling on the ground I have been able to directly observe and whose behavior I have had the opportunity to observe under pressure.
Third, the soil. The vehicle, the timing, the coordination with the customer’s destination. A private flight that ended with a forty-minute wait for a car on the Mykonos tarmac in August rather missed the point.
Unique Concierge has been coordinating private aviation for clients arriving in Greece since 1999. We know the airport, the handling agents, the operators that operate reliably in this environment and the planning details that determine whether a private flight delivers on its promises.
If you are planning a visit to Mykonos or anywhere in Greece and would like aviation to be organized correctly, contact Concierge Unique directly. The flight is the easy part. Everything around it is what we are good at.
Tolis Voutsás Tolis Voutsas is founder and CEO of Unique Concierge. Concierge Unique is a luxury private concierge company established in Mykonos in 1999, arranging villa rentals, yacht charters, private jet transfers, destination weddings and tailor-made experiences for ultra-high net worth clients across Greece and abroad. If you would like to become a guest blogger on A Luxury Travel Blog to raise your profile, please Contact us.
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