The M.R. Štefánik airport in Bratislava (BTS) has announced six new regular lines and one new regular charter flight for 2018. Moreover, new rules for transport of hand luggage for passengers flying with low-cost airliner Ryanair will come into effect mid-January.
New airliner, new destination
New air company, Georgian Airways, will launch a new connection to the Georgian capital Tbilisi on March 27. Flights will be available twice a week on Tuesdays and Fridays. Prices start at €169 €.
WizzAir will also offer a new connection to London, starting on March 25, which will fly seven days a week to London-Luton airport. In May, the Airbus A321, with a capacity of 230 passengers, will be available.
Ryanair postpones new luggage transport conditions Read more Passengers can also fly to new holiday destinations from Bratislava at the end of March 2018 including summer resorts Burgas (Bulgaria), Malta, Paphos in Cyprus, and Thessaloniki in Greece, all operated by Ryanair. A connection to Bologna, Italy will be available in October 2018, airport spokesperson Veronika Ševčíková informed.
Regular charters flights will be enhanced with flights to Catania, Sicily, by the Smartwings company. Other charter flights will include places like Crete and Zakynthos (both in Greece), Gran Canaria and Menorca (in Spain), and Tel Aviv (Israel).
Record number of passengers
Bratislava Airport expects to serve more than 1.9 million passengers this year, which would be the highest figure recorded over the last nine years. This means the airport handled the highest number of passengers in its history: 2.22 million, the SITA newswire wrote on January 3.
The number of passengers flying in and out of the airport reached almost 1.76 million last year, up by 12.3 percent year-on-year. For eleven months of this year, the airport served 1.82 million travelers which is a 10-percent increase from the same period last year.
In July alone, the airport handled over 304,000 passengers which is the highest number in a single month in 66 years of the airport's operation, CEO and Chairman of M.R. Štefánik Airport in Bratislava, Jozef Pojedinec, said.
“In 2017, the airport added five new destinations to its schedule – Warsaw in Poland, Sofia in Bulgaria, Cluj-Napoca in Romania, Tuzla in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Bologna in Italy,” he added.
