Serbia, China to lift air traffic restrictions as new routes planned
The Serbian Civil Aviation Directorate and the Civil Aviation Administration of China have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to remove air traffic restrictions between the two countries. The agreement aims to remove limitations on frequencies and capacities in the aviation sector between the two and promote a commercial partnership between Air Serbia and Hainan Airlines, which plan to ink a codeshare agreement. “With the Memorandum of Understanding, the two countries have agreed to liberalise air traffic rights. This refers in particular to relaxed provisions on codesharing arrangements”, the Serbian Civil Aviation Directorate said. The singing ceremony was attended by Air Serbia’s CEO Jiri Marek, representatives from Hainan Airlines, as well as government officials.
The Serbian Minister for Construction, Transport and Infrastructure, Goran Vesić, noted, “In essence, this Memorandum means there is a free sky agreement between China and Serbia. In the coming period, we expect an increase in the number of flights to China, in addition to the existing two routes that we have, operated by a Chinese carrier twice per week and Air Serbia once per week”. Hainan Airlines has already requested slots at Belgrade Airport for an additional weekly rotation between Beijing and Belgrade, for a total of three, from Thursday July 6. On the other hand, Air Serbia recently secured permits to launch flights from Belgrade to Shanghai.
Air Serbia’s CEO, Jiri Marek, recently said, “The next wave of expansion for us is China. Tianjin proved to be profitable from day one and it has high load factors, so we are continuing to operate to Tianjin. Recently, we secured traffic rights to Shanghai but in China you must go step by step. Once you have traffic rights, you must go for the slots and so on. Therefore, this is only one step closer to Shanghai being the potential next destination. We are also looking at Guangzhou, Chengdu and some other opportunities as well”. Based on indirect traffic volumes during the pre-pandemic 2019, Shanghai was the busiest Chinese route out of Belgrade, while the Serbian capital was the Chinese city’s eleventh busiest unserved destination in the world and seventh in Europe. After Shanghai and Beijing, Belgrade had the most traffic in China to Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Chengdu, Xiamen, Nanjing, Chongqing and Qingdao.
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