Now we can fly to Cologne. The expansion of Tirana's international connections continues with an announcement by German Wings of flights from Tirana to Cologne-Bonn over the summer months. Unfortunately, they only offer one weekly flight each way. If you want to fly to Cologne you will have to leave on Sunday morning at 01.35 and arriving at 03.55 in the morning. Coming back your one option is Saturday night at 22.35 arriving in Tirana shortly after midnight.
I'm not entirely sure who these flights are aimed at since they are of little use to expats and Cologne is not exactly an international hub. The only people I can think of who might make use of them are Albanians working in Germany. German Wings are also starting direct weekend flights from Pristina to Cologne-Bonn and to Hamburg though at more reasonable hours.
Meanwhile, rumours continue to circulate of the return of Lufthansa who are, supposedly, going to introduce a service between Tirana and Frankfurt - that would be a useful flight. However, Lufthansa's own website makes no mention of this, so when it will happen - if it happens - remains unknown.
I'm not entirely sure who these flights are aimed at since they are of little use to expats and Cologne is not exactly an international hub. The only people I can think of who might make use of them are Albanians working in Germany. German Wings are also starting direct weekend flights from Pristina to Cologne-Bonn and to Hamburg though at more reasonable hours.
Meanwhile, rumours continue to circulate of the return of Lufthansa who are, supposedly, going to introduce a service between Tirana and Frankfurt - that would be a useful flight. However, Lufthansa's own website makes no mention of this, so when it will happen - if it happens - remains unknown.
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The returning flight with Albanian Airlines from Frankfurt (where only the name is albanian, the rest are arabs) costs 360 Euros; for a similar price one can fly to NY from Frankfurt. I know of at least 20 people who flew Tirana Frankfurt with Alb. Airl. and then Frankfurt - US with Lufthansa last year. Can't they just analyze their bookings?
have a look at ilovetirana. Could it be that it is you in one of the pics?
Also perhaps of interest to you - Vince Power (who originally founded The Mean Fiddler Organisation) is hoping to do a music festival in Tirana.
No it's not me. Good guess though.
Depending on times of day a flight to Stansted would be great. At the moment the BA flight to Gatwick gets in too late for onward flights in the UK so you end up having to stay overnight in London (or sleep in the airport).
We flew Albanian to Istanbul and they were fine - at least they supplied some food which is more than Austrian has ever managed on its extortionate Vienna flight.
But I wonder how thay are going to add new routes since they don't seem to have very many aircraft.
Thanks for the tip regarding Vince Power and the festival. I will keep an eye out for more information.
I would have liked to get to some of the games but adding up flights, hotels and - by the time I got round to it - black-market tickets, I decided it was best not. And on the basis of England's performances it would have been a waste of money at any price.
So I've been supporting France since on the grounds that they are the only team likely to stop the Italians, though only if they play like they did against Brasil.
BTW, do you know that your site doesn't display properly in Netscape and Mozilla based browsers? It doesn't display at all in Firefox. Only IE and Opera dispay it correctly.
It's probably something to do with the code so you should probably get someone to look at it and check it.
About 30% of the people who come to my site are using Mozilla based browsers so it could be cutting out a lot of potential visitors.