The largest air carrier flying out of Bratislava, low-cost airline SkyEurope, has cancelled flights to the Swiss city Basel, Amsterdam and some holiday resorts as of this month, the Pravda daily wrote on November 8.
SkyEurope is moving a significant number of its flights from Bratislava airport to Vienna, meaning lower incomes ahead for Bratislava.
Over the nine months since February, when SkyEurope began flying out of Vienna, the company has carried 12 percent fewer people on scheduled international flights than in the same period last year.
According to SkyEurope's commercial director, Karim Makhlouf, it is nonsense to view the situation as competition between the Bratislava and Vienna airports, because many flights from Bratislava wouldn't survive and the Vienna airport is also available to Slovak passengers.
"It's still the case that some passengers on planes flying out of Bratislava are from Austria, but it also works the other way around,” he said. “We view Bratislava and Vienna as a single base."
-TASR
Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
The Slovak Spectator cannot vouch for the accuracy of the information presented in its Flash News postings.
9. Nov 2007 at 11:02