Ryanair is closing its Thessaloniki base completely for winter 2026, cutting around seven hundred thousand seats and twelve routes in one move.
That's forty-five per cent down on last winter, and it includes pulling Ryanair's own flying out of Chania and Heraklion, on Crete, for the whole off-peak season.
Not a trim.
A retreat.
October in Greece doesn't run on the flights that stopped in September any more, and that's a little detail worth knowing before you book.
We've rather enjoyed working out what October and November do to travel around the Mediterranean.
The truth turns out not to be one thing.
Some places close down for the winter.
Others carry on as though nobody told them the season had turned.
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Not every airline is pulling back
Ryanair's own reason is Fraport Greece's airport charges, which it says now sit sixty-six per cent above pre-Covid levels.
That's Ryanair's account of its own decision, not an independent verdict on why Greek winter flying is shrinking.
We'd rather hand you that distinction than blur it.
Not our judgement to make.
'That's Ryanair's account of its own decision, not an independent verdict on why Greek winter flying is shrinking.'
The routes going include Thessaloniki to Heraklion and to Chania, both on Crete, and Chania to Paphos, on Cyprus, alongside Athens to Milan-Malpensa.
The freed-up aircraft are heading to Albania, regional Italy and Sweden instead.
Jet2, meanwhile, has launched its first ever winter programme from Gatwick, its fourteenth UK base, running through to the end of March with more than four hundred thousand seats across twenty-four destinations.
Across its whole UK network this winter, Jet2 is carrying four point four million seats, a rise of four per cent on last winter, with more than six hundred outbound flights a week at peak.
It's growing into the season Ryanair is pulling out of.
From Gatwick alone it's flying to Paphos and to Malta twice a week each, and to Antalya up to three times a week, right through the winter.
Closer to home, Jet2 has also added a new route from Bournemouth to Malaga this winter, which is rather a lovely one for us to be able to mention, being not far from us at all.
Norwich Airport tells a smaller, quieter story.
Its TUI service to Crete runs on Tuesdays only, stopping on the twentieth of October and not returning until May.
So the flights aren't thinning everywhere at the same rate.
They're thinning route by route, airline by airline, and which one you happen to be booking matters more than the month on your calendar.
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The islands that switch off
Some of the smaller Cycladic islands do close, in the plain sense of the word. Ios, Folegandros, Milos and Koufonisia are largely shut down from late October through to April, with most hotels, restaurants and tour operators pulling their shutters down.
Not partly.
Fully.
The last visitors tend to leave by the middle of October.
There's something rather lovely about a place that empties out completely for the winter, no soft half-season in between, if that happens to be the quiet you're after.
After that, hotels, tavernas, shops and travel agencies on the smaller islands stay closed until early April.
Greece's own winter tourist season officially runs November to March. The main season is April to October.
Outside it, plenty of these small island businesses aren't open to anyone at all.
If the version of Greece in your head is a few summers old, this is worth checking before you book on memory.
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The ones that don't
Crete, Rhodes and Corfu are a different case entirely.
Their hotels, restaurants and tourist businesses work all year round, in contrast to the small Cycladic islands we've already covered.
Santorini has found its own route through the calendar too. Cruise ship arrivals there now run from March all the way to November, well past the point most people assume the season ends.
Malta barely slows down at all, which we find a genuinely lovely thing about the place.
Passenger traffic through Malta International Airport grew by fifteen point six per cent in the first half of this year.
Even across January to March, deep in the quietest stretch of the year, traffic was still up fifteen point four per cent on the year before, with more than eighty per cent of seats filled.
None of that is dumb luck.
Malta's shoulder season has become a season in its own right, not a runway to standstill.
From Gatwick, Jet2 keeps three flights a week to Antalya and two each to Paphos and to Malta, straight through the winter, and unlike the Crete route out of Norwich, none of the three drops down to a seasonal, thinned-out timetable.
If you want somewhere that stays genuinely open, this little group of names is your shortlist.
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What we could not stand up
There are two facts we went looking for and didn't find.
We tried to check easyJet's own end dates for its Santorini, Mykonos and Corfu routes directly on easyJet's site, and the site refused the request every time we tried. We couldn't confirm them independently, so we've left the exact dates out rather than guess at them for you.
Aegean Airlines' own winter schedule met exactly the same wall, and because we couldn't read its page directly either, nothing about the size of its network appears here.
What we can stand behind is the ferry.
On the Athens to Santorini route, Blue Star Ferries runs a sailing every single day through both October and November this year.
That's a wonderful thing to know if the crossing itself is what's worrying you.
Seajets runs six days a week in November, against two days a week at the height of summer.
The route that matters most doesn't thin the way you might expect it to.
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So where does that leave November?
Perhaps that's the real question for November.
Not how warm it will be, but how open.
One of the pleasures of researching this time of year is exactly that unevenness.
If you want the Mediterranean in October or November without the shutters half down, Crete, Rhodes, Corfu and Malta are where we'd start looking.
Crete, Rhodes and Corfu keep their restaurants open all year, and Malta doesn't slow down either, long after the smaller islands have gone quiet for the year.
Book against the flight schedule rather than the season, and check the route before you fall for the destination.
A hotel can be wide open with nobody able to get to it.
'A hotel can be wide open with nobody able to get to it.'
None of this is about picking somewhere lesser.
A little quieter, that's all.
A quiet island in November has its own particularly lovely charm, and it's one we're always glad to arrange when that's genuinely what you want.
We're already thinking hard about November at No.82. It's when our Greek supper club lands, and a fair amount of what we've found here feeds straight into it.
Sooner than that, we've got a Greek evening with Domes Resorts and Sovereign here at No.82 on Wednesday 30 September, 6pm until 10pm, £25 a head, if you'd like a taste of it first.
Come and talk it through with us. We'll save you a chair.
Come find us at No.82.
hello@agentnouveau.com