Saturday travel

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Our family want to arrive in Symi on Saturday 27th May 2017. Does anyone know of an airline which flies from Gatwick/Heathrow which will arrive in
Rhodes or Kos in time for a ferry to Symi. In 2016 the only option early in the season seemed to be at 8.30 am from Rhodes.
Mike O'D

[Andy W]

Problem is, nobody, including the ferry companies, knows what service will be operating in May 2017. They just won't take time out in the busiest month of the whole year to sit down and work out next year's timetables.

So if you take the "same as last year" scenario as a starting point, you need to look at the flights.
Here again, it is too early to get reliable information. Ryanair, easyJet, Aegean Airlines, Monarch etc don't announce their flight times for summer until the autumn of the previous year. Thomson and Thomas Cook have only Saturday afternoon flights so by the time you get to Rhodes or Kos the last ferry, even on the high season timetable, will be long gone. They also don't have confirmed ATC slots to fly across Europe yet for next year so there's no guarantee the flight would operate at the advertised time.
British Airways do have slots, but here it is a case of so near but yet so far. There's a morning flight from Heathrow to Kos which reaches Kos at 14:55. On the usual summer ferry timetable, the only Saturday Kos-Symi ferry leaves at 16:00. What with immigration, baggage reclaim, and transfer to Kos Port from the airport, that's not a journey I'd book. Their Rhodes flight is Saturday afternoon from Gatwick.

In some years it is possible to get an Aegean flight at 22:15 on a Friday night from Heathrow to Athens, and a connection from Athens to Rhodes which arrives about 06:00, so allowing you to catch an 08:30 ferry. It would certainly be possible to catch the flight from Heathrow and a connecting flight to Kos in time to get the probable afternoon ferry from Kos. The 22:15 flight is very much a fixture in Aegean's timetable, it operates all year round. It is the timing of the connecting flights from Athens that changes year on year.

If you want to take a chance on the ferry timetable changing in your favour then BA have an 07:00 flight from Heathrow to Athens which arrives at 12:35, and either Aegean or Ryanair, or both, will have an afternoon flight from Athens to Rhodes which would catch a 19:00 ferry, should there be one. But this is not a booked connection. You would need to collect your bags in Athens and queue up again to check them in. If the first flight is late so you miss the second one, you're totally on your own, unlike the booked connections offered Aegean to Aegean to Aegean to Olympic Air, where your bags are transferred for you and you receive full protection, including transfer to other flights as available, or overnight accommodation and meals if the next flight with spare seats isn't until the next day.

Obviously in every single case, if your flight is late into Rhodes or Kos and you miss the ferry, that's between you and your travel insurance policy.