Croatia Airlines outlines development plans
Croatia Airlines has presented its short-term plans regarding its fleet and network development. As previously reported, the carrier will lease three aircraft this summer season, two of which will remain with the airline on a long-term basis. An Airbus A319 has been leased for a period of eight years, while a Dash 8 Q400 will have a low utilisation rate and will be primarily used as a spare, so as to limit network disruption, by supplementing any aircraft which may go out of service due to technical reasons. Both aircraft will be delivered in late April. The A319 will have the capacity to seat 150 passengers, which is slightly more than the rest of Croatia Airlines’ A319 fleet, since it was previously utilised by easyJet. The third aircraft, a Bombardier CRJ1000, will be wetleased only during the summer months from Spain’s Air Nostrum.
Croatia Airlines will introduce three weekly seasonal flights from Zagreb to Sofia and Podgorica this summer. “We are expanding our network of destinations to a total of forty cities in 26 counties. That is a respectable number for a small nation such as Croatia”, the carrier’s CEO, Jasmin Bajić, said at a company presentation yesterday. Mr Bajić noted that in addition to point to point travellers, the new routes should help improve loads on services to Western Europe by generating transfer traffic. Flights to the Montenegrin capital were last operated by the airline in February 2013, while services to Sofia will run for the first time.
The Croatian carrier noted that its passenger numbers have improved 1% so far this year, however, it warned of softer demand as a result of the spread of the Coronavirus across the world. “It [virus] has had less of an impact on Croatia Airlines than other European carriers which are dealing with this major issue. Based on our advanced bookings for March, we do see a slump In demand compared to previous years. However, we are still not considerably affected”. The airline noted it had no news concerning its ongoing privatisation process, saying only that any developments will be announced by the government in June at the earliest. The state previously set a June deadline to offload the majority of its shares in the carrier to a private investor. So far, both Aegean Airlines and Air Nostrum have shown interest in acquiring a stake.
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