NEWS FLASH
Kazakhstan’s national carrier Air Astana inaugurated seasonal flights from Almaty and Nur-Sultan to Podgorica last week with a welcome ceremony being held at the airport this Thursday. It marks the first time the airline has operated scheduled services to the former Yugoslavia. Air Astana will maintain operations to Montenegro’s capital until mid-September with its Airbus A321LR aircraft. The initially planned two weekly frequency from each city will now be upped to three per week as of June 25, with the airline offering a total of 31.540 seats between the two countries this summer. During its first week of operations it handled some 1.000 passengers. A group of Kazakh journalists, as well as tour operators are visiting Montenegro this week as part of a familiarisation trip.
Despite the new service, Montenegro is not Kazakhstan’s largest market in the former Yugoslavia. For a full analysis of traffic flow between the central Asian nation and the former Yugoslav republics, subscribe to the EX-YU Aviation Premium Newsletter.
Now this is exotic. And great to see there is enough demand for 6 weekly flights now by Air Astana!
ReplyDeleteDoes anybody know if AirAstana transfers Russias to Montenegro?
ReplyDeleteBecause if they do and if they can sustain 6 PW full with russian transfers and on top of that we have JU with their transfers from 4 russian desrinations (and up to 50 PW to MNE market) it makes a significant increase comparing to 2020.
Good for Montenegro and good for airlines
Kazakhstan is eastern and south of the big Russian cities.
DeleteTransfers are thus useless.
Shows only how succesfull these flights are because they do not depend on russian transfers at all.
So Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Ulanude, Khabarovsk, Petropavlovsk, Magadan, Vladivostok are not big Russian cities. Villages maybe?
DeleteAnd Omsk, Krasnoyarsk, Yakutsk....
DeleteAir Astana does not fly to these Siberian cities.
DeleteOr maybe just to Novosibirsk.
Air Astana flies to Omsk and Novosibirsk. And as a carrier from CIS country, probably codeshares with Russian operators for destinations to the east not operated by their own metal. And I don't know if the passengers are only Kazakh, or Russian as well, or maybe even some others. I just reacted to statement that "Kazakhstan is eastern from big Russian cities" which is simply not true
DeleteThis is why the A321KR or XLR are amazing. You can easily fill them daily and travel longer routes. Even though, this is a medium-haul destination is definitely not a regional hop.
ReplyDeleteTime for MNE to negotiate with Air Buta and launch GYD-TGD.
That is the proof that demand can generated from everywhere. Nobody in Montenegro probably ever heard of Kazakhstan.
ReplyDeleteStill they now fly four (!) times a week to Podgorica now.
The same with Sarajevo and its middle eastern flights.
If airports in Ex Yu would be more proactive and with more vision then there would be much more to gain from.
Especially inactive and totally disappointing Belgrade airport management which missed completely out of all these opportunities ..
I mean this is purely for summer tourists, not much different than Russia-MNE flights. They are not generating demand out of nowhere, they were already planned and in cooperation with local travel agencies.
Delete