Air Serbia boosts operations across network
Air Serbia has increased frequencies on a number of its existing destinations for the coming summer season, both within the region and further afield. The Serbian carrier will boost operations on its flights from Belgrade to Barcelona, Larnaca, Ljubljana, Madrid, Rome and Zagreb, while seasonal increases to cities such as Athens and Thessaloniki will commence earlier on in the year than usual. During the 2020 summer season, the Serbian carrier will maintain three weekly services to both Barcelona and Madrid, which were introduced as new routes this year with two weekly flights. Furthermore, the carrier will grow its Larnaca service from seven to nine weekly, while flights to Rome are currently scheduled to run ten times per week during the summer months, up from seven.
Regionally, Air Serbia will maintain the additional frequencies it introduced to Ljubljana following the collapse of Adria Airways in late September, with the carrier to run seventeen weekly flights between the Serbian and Slovenian capitals, up from twelve for the majority of the 2019 summer season. Operations will be increased to Zagreb as well, with services to operate thirteen times per week, up from eleven. Furthermore, frequencies to Athens and Thessaloniki, which would be increased from the start of the summer timetable in late March, will now grow as early as late January. The airline plans ten instead of seven weekly flights to Athens and six instead of five weekly services to Thessaloniki to be maintained from January 30 until the summer, before they are both increased to the usual double daily operation. The frequency growth on existing services will complement the introduction of over a half a dozen new routes, which are expected to go on sale towards the end of January. The carrier will be adding at least two additional aircraft to its fleet next summer to maintain its schedule.
The airline’s General Manager for Commercial and Strategy, Jiri Marek, recently said, “We went through a massive transformation last year. During that transformation process we saw capacity stagnation. Our first big change was announcing nine new routes in June 2019 but we knew that you can’t just announce nine new routes and expect for the revenue to come in. We also had to make major changes to our commercial strategy. October was our first, let’s say, turnaround month. All the KPIs [Key Performance Indicators] you can imagine in the airline industry went positive and many of them in the double digits. Passenger numbers, load factor, capacity, revenue was positive, RASK [Revenue per Available Seat Kilometer] was also positive and that was only the first month. November was even better. We had 25% growth in passenger numbers on 12% capacity, 8% load factor increase, double digit revenue and positive RASK again”. He added, “We are sitting on a market which is itself growing at around 9%. The Q3 GDP was the highest in Europe at 4.8% and will continue next year. I am extremely positive, at least for us and our region, that next year will be great. We are planning an 18% increase in seats and we will announce ten new destinations in two to three weeks, so from our side it is very positive”.
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