Greece Fires: Swiss Foreign Ministry And Tour Operators Help Holidaymakers

Swiss tour operators and the government are helping Swiss holidaymakers in need on the Greek island of Rhodes, which has been hit by forest fires.

Tour operators are organising return flights to Switzerland and the government has opened a counter at Rhodes airport.

Tour operator Kuoni said on Monday it was running an extra Rhodes-Switzerland flight on Tuesday night in conjunction with Helvetic Tours and ITS Coop Travel. A Kuoni media spokesman said about 100 seats on the Edelweiss airline plane could be offered by the three tour operators.

The seats were intended for people who had been evacuated from hotels that were no longer habitable and were now staying in public accommodation, for example. These are holidaymakers who can no longer enjoy a relaxing holiday, he said. Priority would be given to the most affected guests. He assumed the plane would be well occupied.

A media spokeswoman for tour operator Hotelplan said her company was in the process of organising return flights for Rhodes travellers willing to leave the island. Some of these would go via Kos or Crete because the connections to Rhodes are currently very busy.

Kuoni and Hotelplan want to provide customers planning to travel to Rhodes in the next few days with free cancellations or rebookings. Tui Switzerland is also offering free rebooking, according to a statement on the company's website. Tui Switzerland is not planning on flying to Rhodes until Tuesday.

The Touring Club of Switzerland (TCS) announced on Monday that it had so far helped 80 TCS members in distress on the Greek island off the Turkish coast.

On Monday the foreign ministry said it had opened a counter at Rhodes airport for Swiss citizens seeking help. This became possible after an additional consular officer arrived on the island.

The ministry also announced that its helpline had meanwhile answered around 150 enquiries about the situation on Rhodes.

It has also adapted its travel advice on greeceexternal link . It recommends following the instructions of the local authorities and provides telephone numbers of the Greek authorities for foreigners seeking help.

The foreign ministry also writes that in an exceptional situation, Swiss travellers abroad must inform themselves about the situation. The decision to remain in the country or to leave is their responsibility. The ministry also calls on people to register on the mobile phone application“Travel Admin” in order to receive information quickly.

The foreign ministry still has no overall picture of the number of Swiss nationals affected by the evacuations on Rhodes, it said. It has no information on any Swiss victims of the forest fires.

The media spokeswoman for Hotelplan and the spokesman for Kuoni said their clients were all well.

A weeklong wildfire on the Greek island of Rhodes tore past defences on Monday, forcing more evacuations, as three major fires raged elsewhere in the country fuelled by strong winds and successive heatwaves.

The latest evacuations were ordered in southern Rhodes after 19,000 people, mostly tourists, were moved in buses and boats over the weekend out of the path of the fire that reached several coastal areas from nearby mountains.

Help continued to arrive from the European Union and elsewhere, with Turkish firefighting planes joining the effort in Rhodes, where eight water-dropping planes and ten helicopters buzzed over flames up to five metres tall despite low visibility.

“The risk of fire will be extreme in several areas of Greece today,” fire service spokesperson Vassilis Vathrakogiannis said a day after temperatures on the southern Greek mainland soared as high as 45°C.

Overnight, evacuations were also ordered on the western island of Corfu, where more than 2,000 people including tourists were moved to safety, on the island of Evia and in a mountainous area in the southern Peloponnese region.

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