Transavia and Easyjet dominated in Innsbruck
After two challenging pandemic years, Innsbruck Airport draws a positive balance for the past year: with a total of 721,412 passengers in scheduled and charter traffic, a clear upward trend is noticeable. “Innsbruck is thus taking the place of the second-largest federal state airport and is expected to be able to close 2022 with a positive operating result,” writes the airport.
“The extreme passenger growth of around 475 percent compared to the very weak, exceptional year 2021 should not hide the fact that we are still around 37 percent behind the best year to date, 2019, with around 1.14 million passengers,” it said.
“In the first four months there was no connection to Frankfurt,” says Airport Director Marco Pernetta. “All the more gratifying was the resumption of the Frankfurt route with the Lufthansa subsidiary Air Dolomiti, which has again been offering three daily flights to/from Frankfurt since May 2022. In the future, the offer will even be increased to up to four flights per day.”
In terms of flight movements, the airport in 2022, with 7,450 movements in scheduled and charter traffic, was at a level comparable to the end of the 1980s or around 38 percent below the level of 2019.
While in winter it was mainly guests from Great Britain, the Netherlands and Scandinavia (together more than 460,000 passengers and thus more than 60 percent of the annual passenger volume), in summer 2022 around 30,000 Tyroleans used Innsbruck Airport to start their summer vacation. The main destination countries were Greece from Italy and Spain.
For the first time, the airlines with the largest number of passengers were Transavia and Easyjet, both of which, in addition to an intensive winter flight program, also offer two year-round destinations with London Gatwick and Amsterdam from/to Innsbruck. In general, around every fourth passenger was on a flight from London airport to Innsbruck last year, which means that the London area was the next single market of origin for Innsbruck Airport in 2022.
“We were particularly pleased,” says Pernetta, “that since December 2022 there has also been a Paris connection with the Air France subsidiary Hop Airlines in our flight schedule for the first time”. For the time being, the two connections per week (Saturday and Sunday) to Paris’s largest airport, Charles-de-Gaulle, are planned until the end of March, but negotiations are already underway about a new version in winter 2023/24 and a continuation of the route in summer 24.