Since the beginning of 2023, there has been a significant increase in passengers ‎at Bulgaria's Varna Airport. It seems that the Bulgarian Black sea capital is about to catch up ‎with the serious outflow of travelers in the last two years, related to the Covid ‎pandemic. There was also talk of restarting destinations that were not active ‎until recently.

"There is great interest and increased traffic of low-cost airlines ‎from the summer of 2022," said Denitsa Milosavljevic, head of the Aviation ‎Marketing Department of Varna Airport, in an interview with Daniela ‎Stoynova from BNR-Varna.‎

"From the beginning of 2023, passenger growth is 57% compared to 2019. ‎This winter, we have 18 year-round destinations at Varna Airport, which ‎is a success and is more than in previous years. During this summer season, ‎there will be three additional routes to and from Varna Airport. These are ‎Katowice, Krakow in Poland and Vilnius in Lithuania. At airports in Europe ‎with a capacity of up to 5 million passengers, in the last 10 years we have seen ‎an almost double growth of passengers on low-cost flights. For the last year, it ‎was on average over 40%. And for Varna Airport in the last 3 years, the share ‎of passengers on low-cost flights is over 50%".‎

Varna Airport offers a combination of new routes, new airlines and the ‎restart of routes that have not been operated for several years, Milosavljevic ‎also specified, adding:‎

‎"We have a restart on several routes in the Scandinavian countries - the cities of ‎Bergen, Helsinki, Aalborg, which have not been served with regular flight ‎routes since the summer of 2019. We have a restart on the route from Belgrade, ‎which has not been operated since 2016 over here. It will start again from the ‎beginning of June with 4 flights a week. We also have a combined route of ‎charter flights from Karlovy Vary and Pardubice in the Czech Republic, a new ‎airline with flights from Tel Aviv at the end of June. And another new airline ‎at Varna Airport is from Ukraine with 3 Polish routes from Katowice, Warsaw ‎and Poznan. We also expect flights from the new Warsaw airport, which will ‎be operated in addition to the flights from the main airport," said Denica ‎Milosavljevic.‎

And can we expect positive surprises from the German market where an ‎outflow of tourists has recently been observed?‎

‎‎"The German market at Varna Airport is developing well. We are talking about ‎travellers who are not travelling for the purpose of tourism, but rather arriving ‎to visit relatives and friends or for the purpose of business trips”, explains ‎Denitsa Milosavljevich. “In this regard, Germany is the market with the largest ‎share of passengers at the airport in Varna. Last year it took a third of the ‎market share. We expect growth, recovery and even surpassing the levels of ‎‎2019 this year."‎

With the markets of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, Varna airport has lost more ‎than 180,000 passengers compared to 2019, Milosavljevic also reported. She  ‎added that at the moment there are good indications from Central European ‎markets such as Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary.‎

Compiled by Veneta Nikolova /based on an interview by Daniela Stoynova, ‎BNR-‎Varna/‎

Photos: Varna Airport