Ruzyně Airport has 165 confirmed summer destinations, 13 more than last year
Prague's Václav Havel Airport has so far confirmed scheduled flights to 165 destinations for the summer schedule, which is 13 more than last year. 67 airlines will operate the service. The airport will announce the final numbers by the end of the month. It was announced at yesterday at a press conference. The summer schedule, which will be in effect from March 31, still does not match the number of routes from the pre-flight year 2019, when 190 destinations were flown.
The airport should reach the numbers from before the Covid-19 pandemic by the end of 2025 or the beginning of 2026, Prague Airport's director of air business development, said Jiří Vyskoč. He said the numbers are not growing as much because of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
The airport is also facing a shortage of planes after the covida pandemic. Some of the machines of various companies had to stay on the ground for several months due to technical problems, Vyskoč said. These included problems with Boeing 737 MAX 9 and Boeing 737-900 ER aircraft, which were pointed out by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA).
In the ending winter schedule, Prague Airport had flights to 111 destinations, up by a quarter year-on-year. In 2019, it flew to 121 destinations in the winter.
Prague Airport handled 13.8 million passengers last year, up about 29 percent from 2022 and down 22 percent from 2019. This year, Ruzyně Airport plans to handle 15.5 million passengers and add more than 170 destinations to its offer.
Last year, the airport managed to renew several routes or launch new ones, for example, Korean Air returned to Seoul, South Korea. China Airlines started flying to Taiwan from Prague. Flights to Agadir in Morocco with Eurowings, to Bilbao in Spain with Vueling, to Dubrovnik in Croatia with Croatia Airlines and to the East Midlands in the UK with Ryanair and Jet2.com have also been added to the schedule.
Ryanair has also added new routes to Gdansk in Poland, Rimini in Italy, Seville in Spain and the Greek island of Skiathos. In addition to new routes to Taiwan with China Airlines, Icelandair offered flights to Keflavik, while World2Fly offered charter flights to Vietnam, the Dominican Republic and Cuba.
The most popular destinations last year were the UK, Italy, Spain, Turkey and France. Direct flights between Prague and London were the most frequent, with 1.1 million passengers. Paris followed with almost 700,000 passengers and Milan came third with 545,000 passengers.
Source: CTK
