Air Serbia marks first year of China operations with strong results

Air Serbia celebrated its first anniversary yesterday since entering the Chinese market and launching flights between Belgrade and Tianjin. As the only European carrier serving the city, some 130 kilometres south-east of Beijing, the airline has carried just over 20.000 passengers on the route in its first year of operations with a total of 55 flights each way. Offering just over 29.000 seats on the market since last December, the airline’s annual average cabin load factor on the route stood at 75%. Businesspeople and outbound Chinese tourists made up the majority of travellers on the service during its first year. Over the January - October period in 2023, a total of 78.427 Chinese tourists visited Serbia.

The Belgrade - Tianjin route launched with one weekly rotation and has increased to two per week since October 29 of this year. Commenting recently on the Tianjin service, Air Serbia’s CEO, Jiri Marek, said, “As a collateral benefit of Covid we saw a great opportunity to open China. We launched Tianjin while Covid restrictions were still present in China in December of last year and the service became profitable from day one. For us, the main development now is on the Chinese market where we see potential. Tianjin was the only option available to launch during Covid because there were a lot of restrictions in place. We initially considered it as a temporary destination which would be replaced with another point in China once the market opened up. However, since it became profitable and there is no other European carrier serving the city, before Covid there were LOT and Neos from Italy, why would we change it”.

The Chinese market remains a priority in Air Serbia’s long-haul development plans. “We secured traffic rights for Guangzhou and Shanghai. As soon as we get the third and fourth [widebody] aircraft, those are the destinations which will come first. The Chinese market is based on leisure and corporate demand. It has different seasonality than North America because demand is more spread out throughout the year and there is a peak in January and February, which fits well into our strategy and development”, Mr Marek noted. The service to Tianjin has also benefited from significant cargo volumes, which is expected to further increase after Serbia and China inked a free trade agreement this October.