Promo - published on 22 March 2024
Fonte: ufficio stampa Gruppo SAVE
Thursday 21 March 2024
The 2024 summer season of the Northeastern Airport Hub (Venice, Treviso, Verona) is expected to have traffic volumes up by 5% compared to summer 2023.
Approximately 13million total passengers are expected from April to October, with a definitive recovery compared to 2019 when, in the same period, the three airports had handled 12.7million passengers.
At the summer edition of the B2B event “VAW – Venice/Verona Airport Workshop”, the sector’s operators confirmed the market’s dynamism and their interest in the news for the coming months.
At the conclusion of the “Summer 2024” edition of the Venice/Verona Airport Workshop – a B2B event organised on 20 and 21 March, dedicated to professionals for a comparison on travel demand/supply at the airports of Venice, Treviso and Verona – the North-Eastern Airport Pole draws the summaries of a particularly positive meeting, which announces a strong demand for travel for the upcoming summer season and confirms the revival of traffic volumes, once again growing compared to 2023 and to 2019 levels.
The meetings were very well attended, welcoming a total of 175 travel agents, who had the opportunity to hold dedicated meetings with 65 operators, including airlines, tourism boards and tour operators. This is a periodic occasion aimed at bringing together the main players in the sector in a single setting, resulting in packaged travel proposals for the general public.
For the 2024 summer season, which will start on Sunday 31 March and end on Saturday 26 October, the outlook for the three Pole airports is of a very high demand for domestic and international flights, with an overall growth in passenger numbers of 5% compared to the 2023 summer season. A percentage that would be higher if at Marco Polo the main low-cost carriers had not halted their development programmes due to the choice of the Venice City Council to introduce from May 2023 the new surcharge of €2.50 for each passenger departing from the airport.
Venice “Marco Polo” Airport
The Venetian airport confirms its role as the third national intercontinental gateway, further strengthened by the liveliness of the North American market, which reconfirms the summer connections to Atlanta, Chicago, New York JFK, New York Newark, Philadelphia, Montreal and Toronto.
These are the novelties for North America:
Delta Air Lines brought forward the start of its daily flight to New York JFK to 11 March and during the summer peak increases its weekly flights to Atlanta from 7 to 10.
On 6 June American Airlines returns to Venice with its daily connection to Chicago, interrupted during the pandemic period.
Canada also sees an intensification of connections: Air Canada doubles its flights to Montreal and Toronto to three and four a week respectively. On the same destinations, Air Transat offers a total of 4 weekly frequencies.
To the Middle East, Qatar Airways resumed in June its daily connection to Doha, which had been suspended during the pandemic. The flight is operated year-round with wide-body B787 Dreamliner aircraft and joins the consolidated presence of Emirates, which operates daily flights to Dubai with Boeing 777s equipped with first class cabin.
South Korea returns as a protagonist in the resumption of flows with the Far East, with the weekly Venice-Seoul flight, operated from June to October.
In the Mediterranean area, EL AL re-proposes from 31 March the connections with Tel Aviv 4 times a week, which will become 5 in the summer peak. In addition, Air Cairo, an Egyptair group carrier, connects Venice with Sharm El-Sheik every Sunday.
From May, the Icelandic carrier PLAY resumes flights to Reykjavik for the second summer season and from June SunExpress reactivates connections to Izmir, both routes have twice-weekly frequencies.
Among the European network carriers, which with their multi-day operations guarantee connectivity to the reference hubs, of note is the resumption of the double daily flight to Madrid by Air Europa, Finnair’s increase to nine weekly frequencies to Helsinki in the summer peak, which will be followed by the daily extension of the line in the winter, and the introduction of night-stop frequencies by Swiss International Airlines to Zurich, a strategic airport for intercontinental connections.
It should be pointed out that, following the introduction of the new surcharge of €2.50 by the Municipality of Venice for each departing passenger, the low-cost carriers Ryanair and Wizz Air, which had opened their bases at Marco Polo in 2022 with strong development prospects, literally halted their growth at the airport.
Treviso “Antonio Canova” Airport
The Treviso airport, with 48 connected destinations in 23 countries, thanks to the operations of Ryanair and Wizz Air, anticipates traffic volumes in line with the 2019 summer season.
Albania, Spain, Romania, Poland and Belgium are the European markets offering the highest number of seats for sale. A variety of countries that confirms the consolidated appreciation of the airport also by business passengers, in addition to those travelling for tourism and VFR (Visit Friends and Relatives), which together make up the Canova passenger profile.
Verona “Valerio Catullo” Airport
For Verona’s Catullo airport, a season with many new features is in store, significantly expanding travel opportunities for the Verona catchment area, offering a total of 82 destinations in 31 countries, connected by 25 scheduled carriers.
Volotea, by adding a third aircraft to the Verona base, undertakes a considerable investment that leads to the opening of seven new destinations: Comiso, Copenhagen, Madrid, Prague and Valencia operating already in March, to be joined by Bordeaux in April and Salerno in September.
Ryanair is also helping to bring Verona closer to Spain, with four-weekly connections to Madrid and Valencia.
SkyAlps connects Verona to Croatia for the first time, with weekly flights to Brac and Zara operating from June. Also in the Balkans, a twice-weekly flight to Mostar, in Bosnia Herzegovina, will be operative from April.
A great return, after nine years of absence, is that of Air France, which from 2 April reinserts Verona among its destinations, with a three-weekly flight on the Paris Charles de Gaulle hub, thus favouring opportunities for continuation towards a wide network of international and intercontinental flights. This is a valuable contribution to Catullo’s connectivity, in addition to the flights on the Frankfurt and Munich hubs operated by Lufthansa Group’s Air Dolomiti.
In addition to the domestic market, which has 13 connected destinations, the main international markets are the United Kingdom (11 destinations) and Germany (5 destinations), both with a strong incoming connectivity, followed by Spain (8 destinations), which registers a good contribution of both outgoing and incoming traffic.
With the summer, Neos, an Alpitour group carrier based at Catullo with both medium and long haul aircraft and a reference point for outgoing tourist traffic, reconfirms its programme with short, medium and long haul connections to holiday destinations, particularly in Italy, Iceland, Egypt, Tunisia, Kenya, Tanzani
