All capital city airports in the former Yugoslavia are expected to see passenger growth during September when compared to last year, based on available scheduled seat capacity levels. Ryanair will retain its position as the region’s largest carrier, ahead of Air Serbia and Wizz Air.
Belgrade Airport has the most available seats on scheduled flights in September, standing at 975.487. The figure represents an increase of 4.4% on 2023. Air Serbia, which will grow its capacity by 5.5%, will continue to maintain its position as the largest carrier, holding 54.9% of all available scheduled capacity at the airport. Wizz Air, which will have more flights than last year for the first time since March, will still register a 10.5% decline in capacity due to the usage of Airbus A320 aircraft instead of the A321s. Zagreb follows as the second largest with 523.115 available seats on scheduled flights during the month. It represents an increase of 16.2% on last year. Croatia Airlines will retain its position as the largest carrier at the airport, with 33.3% of available capacity. It is followed by Ryanair with 30.4% of all available seats.
Skopje Airport will see more capacity than last year for the first time since March with a total of 320.375 seats, up 3%. This is despite Wizz Air reducing its capacity by 9.5% on last year. While the carrier will have a 10% increase in the number of operated flights, it will be unable to make up for the usage of the A320s instead of the A321s. Wizz Air will hold a 48.8% share of available seats, followed by Pegasus Airlines. Pristina Airport will have 278.628 available seats, however, it has numerous flights sold exclusively through tour operators which are considered as charters. Therefore, these are not included in the overall scheduled seat capacity. If only seats on scheduled flights are taken into account, the airport sees an increase of 14.7% in capacity on last year. easyJet has the largest volume of scheduled seats, holding a 16.4% share, ahead of Chair Airlines with 15.4%.
Sarajevo Airport has 242.927 scheduled seats on the market in September, a notable increase of 43.4% on 2023. Pegasus Airlines is the largest carrier with 12.7% of capacity. It is followed by Turkish Airlines with an 11.3% share. Podgorica Airport has 203.328 seats on scheduled flights in September, an increase of 15.5% on 2023. Wizz Air is the largest with 22.8% of total capacity, despite a 5.8% reduction on last year, while national carrier Air Montenegro is the sixth-largest. Finally, Ljubljana Airport has 159.690 seats on scheduled services available this September, which is up 13.1% on last year. Lufthansa will be its largest carrier with a 17.6% capacity share, ahead of Turkish Airlines with 11.5% of scheduled capacity.
Largest carriers by scheduled seat capacity in the former Yugoslavia, September 2024
Finally all back to growth.
ReplyDeleteA narrow minded comment.
DeleteThe article said everything about this so called growth and who carries it. Another proof this market is trash.
Huh?
Deleteand in Italy, Spain who is the leader? So its also trash right?
DeleteNo Spain has only Iberia and Italy has ITA which even italians hate it and choose to fly with easy, ryan and wizz.
DeleteSpain also has Air Europa, and I don't know a single Italian who prefers LCCs to ITA.
DeleteRyanair is the biggest airline in Spain, Ireland, Italy and Poland. easyJet is the biggest in the UK.
DeleteIt’s amazing how closely growth/declines at the airports have closely followed these capacity increases/reductions. Good to see all are growing.
ReplyDeleteThis cannot possibly be a serious comment?
DeleteWhat exactly is the issue?
Deletekeep them coming
DeleteWow that’s a pretty high number of seats for BEG. Next year it will probably be over a million seats in September.
ReplyDeleteMark this year, adding charters
DeleteIs there a chance for Skopje to end the year with more passengers than last year?
ReplyDeleteI don't think so. November and December won't be great.
DeleteWizz Air screwed the airport over for most of the year. In first quarter growth was crazy.
DeleteWhen will W6 resolve their engine problems?
DeleteThey expect the whole process to take until summer 2026. But things will start improving from next summer.
DeleteHope so.
DeleteSKP will finish the year with 3m but not more then that like it was expected before the Wizz cuts.
DeleteI don’t think the SKP managment are specilly good or serious about their role. Its sad to see W6 hold almost 50% of the airport. What does the airport plan to do in case W6 one day wake up and decide to close down like they did in TZL or SJJ?
DeleteTAV should not be blamed. The demand is just not there.
DeleteFantastic year for Zagreb continues.
ReplyDelete+1 wonder what it will be like in winter.
DeleteSimilar growth by percentage.
DeleteZagreb is on schedule to hit 4.3 million passengers this year. At current rate of growth, airport is likely to exceed 4.3 million but won't hit 4.4 million.
Delete"Zagreb follows as the second largest with 523.115 available seats on scheduled flights during the month. It represents an increase of 16.2% on last year."
On average airport has been growing at 16% pace, so it is expected this trend will continue for the rest of this year. Very likely airport will have around 445-450 000 passengers in August, reaching around 2.85 million at the end of August and it looks likely in September airport will also exceed 400 000 mark, very likely in September based on available seats.
I anticipate, traffic for September will be between 415 000 and 425 000 passengers. If October replicates noumbers of seats availability, then we're looking at June, July, August, September and October having more than 400k passengers in a single month. Good chance November and December won't have less than 650 000 pax over two month period, we can presume or estimate total noumber of passengers for 2024, which comes to around 4,33 million. Not bad for 2024 imho, hopefully 2025 can bring that 5th millionth passenger in a single year, fingers crossed. It'll depend on how fast Ryan Air expands and Croatian Airlines as well.
Croatian Airlines will get its 2nd A220 at the end of this year if I am not mistaken and 3 more A220s in 2025. That should help the airline a bit, we'll see.
5 new aircraft will help a bit?? LMAO!
DeleteWell it's not like those aircraft are coming on top.
Delete16% growth is not the same in terms of actual added passengers when your airport has 4M passengers and when it has 8M passengers. On top of that, Belgrade is shaping up to once again have double-digit growth in 2025. So if BEG makes 15% growth next year, some other airport half the size would need to grow 30% for both airports to add same number of passengers.
DeleteYup. ZAG has experienced a kind of "renaissance" over the last couple of years - in terms of the passenger growth, investments and so on.
DeleteWith that said, I can't see it achieving 4.3 million passengers this year, much less exceed that number.
I'm not being negative, just realistic.
In my opinion, ZAG will surpass 4 million this year but it'll finish at 4.25 million max. Hope I'm wrong.
Likewise, I'm even more certain the airport won't get to 5 million next year. The management itself doesn't expect it to - that's why they're planning the concourse expansion for 2026.
I don't buy into conspiracy theories about them purposefully setting it up that way, and I've come across those theories on multiple occasions right here in the comments. I'm not making them up.
I predict the next year for ZAG being very similar to what BEG was experiencing some 9 - 10 years ago...many will be claiming or rooting for 5 mill. and in the end, the airport will fall just short of it.
Will Wizz Air return the A321s to SKP and BEG next year?
ReplyDeleteBEG should raise taxes to W6. Maybe that would help them put their businesses back together
DeleteNo, that would make them leave.
DeleteAt some point they will return the A321s, because now they have only 37 of them and once they are near the end with this problem on the A21N they will continue to retire their A320s. Even before they start doing that, there are other bases which have operated with A320s for ever, such as Wroclaw, Debrecen, Varna, Craiova, Sibiu, Timisoara, sometimes also Iasi and Cluj.
DeleteBravo Fraport!
ReplyDeleteNajgori od sve dece
DeleteWhy ZAG has four times the growth rate of BEG?
ReplyDeleteBecause last year it had 1% passenger growth in peak summer months.
DeleteThats not true. ZAG grew big last year.
DeleteSo why did it had so much growth this year? And why is BEG's growth so small compared with ZAG and the other airports?
DeletePercentage terms don't give a full picture since Belgrade's base is much higher compared to Zagreb's therefore for percentage increase to be larger, it needs to add much more passengers than Zagreb. Same way Sarajevo adds less seats than BEG or ZAG but its percentage growth is 40%.
DeleteSecond Ryanair opened several new routes in Zagreb this year. In Belgrade Wizz Air which is number 2 airline at the airport, decreased capacity by 20%+ because of engine issues.
At the end of the day, BEG is going to end 2024 with record passenger numbers, several new long haul routes, new airlines and new short haul routes too. I doubt they are worried about your conclusions how that is bad.
DeleteTrying to find the several new routes (apart from JU) and new airlines…
DeleteAir Serbia - Mostar, Nice, Guangzhou, Shanghai (and more to be announced soon)
DeleteEl Al by Sun d'Or - Tel Aviv
Sky Express - Heraklion
China Southern - Guangzhou
Next time include even more things to exclude to help your argument.
BEG needs to attract more airlines, both LCCs and traditional.
ReplyDeleteIt is about to add one of the world's largest airlines in a few weeks.
Delete@Anon 09:21
DeleteHow much will China Southern increase BEG's capacity?
It is easy to calculate. Monthly 4,400 seats. Not bad at all. That's like 23 Ryanair flights.
DeleteWow , with 2 weekly flights ?! What a growth ! They should better maintain British airways and attract more legacies like Air France , Iberia , SAS , ITA .
DeleteOk, I'm sure you would find it significant if they were adding flghts to your airport.
DeleteI tend to think the French, Spanish, Italian and Scandinavian markets are well covered from Belgrade, making it difficult for those you mentioned to compete in order to make money. It is much easier for them to compete at nearby airports with no or minimal competition.
For example, there are flights from Belgrade to Paris Charles de Gaulle, Paris Beauvais, Nice and Lyon - that's 30 flights per week between Belgrade and France.
Between Belgrade and Spain, there are flights to Madrid, Barcelona, Palma, Valencia and Malaga - 26 weekly flights.
Between Belgrade and Scandinavia there are flights to Oslo, Stockholm Arlanda, Stockholm Skavsta, Copenhagen, Gothenburg and Malmo - 36 weekly flights.
Between Belgrade and Italy there are flights to Rome Fiumicino, Rome Ciampino, Milan Malpensa, Milan Bergamo, Bologna, Bari, Catania, Naples, Palermo and Venice or 44 weekly flights.
Anon 09:52 I love Belgrade and my airport has almost all the legacies and even more from US , Canada , all the middle eastern airlines , from Africa , singapore etc. I Just don't like this protectionism to Air Serbia .
DeleteWhat an answer! You blew him away!
DeleteAlmost all legacy’s? Lol
DeleteAgain, your comment makes little sense like the one where you made fun about China Southern's flights. No airline from any of the countries listed is forbidden to launch flights to Belgrade. They can do so whenever they want. As mentioned, unlike other airports in the region, they face a lot of competition in BEG. Both from the national airline and on many routes from a low cost airline too. Faced with that prospects, it is easier and less risky to start flights to an airport with less competition and opportunity to make more money as a result. British Airways will end flights after a year. No one revoked its license. It is stopping flights because its 3 weekly flights were completely uncompetitive against daily Wizz Air and 9 weekly Air Serbia flights. On top of that you can't compete for transfer passengers to the US when the local airline offers 10 weekly nonstop flights to the US while Lufthansa offers connections on 3 daily flights via its hubs, not to mention Swiss, Austrian and Turkish Airlines. So your comment is rather bizarre.
DeleteAnd to add, those airlines all have to compete against JU which has shown it is prepared to enter a pricing war with any airline that launches flights on routes they operate. Sometimes they win, sometimes they loose. But it is a big difference compared to say another airline in the region which did nothing for 3 years when Europe's largest airline opened a base at its airport. In fact it shrunk.
DeleteAnon 10:02 there's no greater government protection for an airline in the region than when government official claims airline will be protected as it is needed for tourism of the country. That was said during A220 arrival
DeleteTrue dat.
DeleteNot true at all. Croatian market is liberal and there is no state protectionism for amy airline.
Delete@anon 12:50
DeleteYou must be new here. The Croatian state is pumping millions into Croatia Airlines every year through various forms of advertising, PSO, local tourist boards etc.
That is not state protectionism.
Delete@13.43 I suggest you give up. The person/troll has already illustrated that he cares little about any facts. He is only here to spit on a neighboring country by making things up and praising his own. Move on.
DeleteYou are the one who doesnt care about facts. Where is state protectionism in Croatia when it is literaly ILLEGAL by EU law?
DeleteLet them be. The truth is, OU has been left to their own devices over the past 20 years. Not one Government has cared about OU. It is clear when one sees who OU's CEO is.
DeleteOwn devices? Check how much aid the airline has received over the past few years. It got millions during covid, none of which it has been repaid. Not to mention the millions it got the night before Croatia entered the EU.
Delete@anon 13:53
DeleteThe state keeping its flag carrier afloat and distorting market competition is not state protectionism? Please continue to impress us with your economic knowledge.
You don't what protectionism means.
DeleteAnaliticar, please get back to your own blog and keep spreading your ridiculous statements, views, "analyses", predictions, stories, dreams, etc. there. This is far more serious place, with a people who knows a lot more about aviation than you.
Delete@Anon 13:43
DeleteIf that were all, it wouldn't be worth a mention. Advertising? Pfft...Croatian government has been pumping tens of millions of euros into OU directly. Advertising, PSO, local tourist boards...that's nothing, it's pocket change.
Thing is, those last €30 million or so from 2 years ago - the covid compensation, was literally the last sum of money the state has legally given to OU. There will be no more sums like that because the EC won't allow it.
Last year, OU has sold a bunch of equipment (mostly aircraft) and thus ended the year in the black. Barely.
This year, it's already deep in the red and that's not going to change.
Basically, at this point they're in a situation of; you either swim or you drown.
It's why they're being desperate and coming up with schemes such as merging OU with the state owned airports into one giant conglomerate...initially funded by the profits of ZAD, SPU and DBV. The ultimate goal tho, would be selling them all as one package, or selling OU with a concession period over the airports as an added bonus.
In any case, the situation isn't good to say the least. And it's potentially going to get even worse by dragging the profitable airports down with OU. The worst thing of all is: there's nothing illegal in doing what I've described above, while political accountability in this case is a pipe dream, due to the fact that, at least in my experience, most people in Croatia don't follow this issue nor are they particularly interested in it.
Montenegro keeps winning!
ReplyDeletewow Sarajevo growth is massive!
ReplyDeleteFinally showing its potential, well done
DeleteHappy for SJJ but there is still room to grow, especially in connections with western European markets.
DeleteSarajevo has really crushed it this year, well done!
Deletesure it will be massive when it was a catastrophy before
DeleteCatastrphy? They managed to keep almost the exact same amount of pax despite W6 pulling out. That is called excellent crisis managment and something that a few airports in this region would be able to solve in such time frame.
DeleteBravo Hrvatska!
ReplyDeleteLet's see what the subsidy tenders bring for Ljubljana and Sarajevo in the next few months.
ReplyDeleteI see someone taking up Barcelona-Sarajevo. Not really too optimistic about the Ljubljana tender.
DeleteAlso I think these will be mainly for next summer flight, not this winter.
DeleteI am hoping for Barcelona - Sarajevo and Copenhagen - Sarajevo
DeletePrague as well is something that could happen. There have been talks about Krakow as well but LOT management isn't sure if it'd work if a legacy carrier does it, though they will increase WAW frequencies, leaving Visegrad states to Wizz and Ryan.
DeleteAny idea what airport is on the photo? With the Lauda and JU plane?
ReplyDeleteWondering this too
DeleteSTR
DeleteThanks!
DeleteIt's Stuttgart, I work there
DeleteRyanair now really far in front in the region.
ReplyDeleteIt will drop off from November. But they have been really dominant this summer.
DeleteEspecially with Wizz Air fading.
DeleteFar in front?? OMG!!!
DeleteInteresting that Lufthansa has more presence in the region now than some years (pre-pandemic) ago. Even ahead of Turkish Airlines
ReplyDeleteI also notice that Eurowings has a very big presence
DeleteEurowings: summer Adria coast
DeleteWould be interesting to see the same for Split, Dubrovnik and Zadar.
ReplyDeleteThere was a similar article a while back
Deletehttps://www.exyuaviation.com/2024/07/dubrovnik-sarajevo-and-zagreb-become.html
Nice, thank you.
DeleteThanx god LJU is still listed .... bad management.
ReplyDeleteShhh don't say that. You must praise Fraport, it has the best management.
DeleteLJU is growing and by a lot based on those numbers.
DeleteAt -25% compared to 2019. Bravo Fraport!
DeleteThis is a good point. @Admin, could you tell us what is the capacity difference compared to 2019?
DeleteQ1: -35.7%
DeleteQ2: -33.5%
Q3: -34.6%
September: -32.4%
Thanks for that. Would be interesting to compare difference between capacity and actual number of passengers. It seems that the difference comparing passengers number is smaller than in capacity.
DeleteIn regards to passengers:
DeleteQ1: -24.8%
Q2: -23.9%
Thank you. Data clearly shows that the decline of passengers is considerably lower than capacity, so the loads much better than in times of JP.
DeleteAnonimno13:19
DeleteLJU raste in glede na te številke precej.
Ljubljano pozabite. Zavoženo, ni pomoči.
The capacity levels are actually great for September for most airports.
ReplyDeleteSo basicly SKP in July,August and September will have 300k each month , thats 900k pax for 3 months , it is not that bad after Wizz cuts , the other routes and airlines covers that numbers , esepcially the charters.
ReplyDeleteGreat year for most airports!
ReplyDelete