July the 4th, 2025 – British Airways is set to suspend the operations of its London-Zagreb winter flights, citing hard competition from the popular Ryanair.
As Poslovni Dnevnik/Sinisa Malus writes, British Airways will suspend flights between London Heathrow and Zagreb for the upcoming winter 2025/26 season. That flight schedule begins on October the 26th and runs until March the 28th next year.
The British Airways London-Zagreb winter flights will therefore operate during the winter, and ticket sales have now been suspended, reports Ex-Yu Aviation News. The airline plans to resume seasonal summer operations on March the 29th, 2026.
Since resuming flights back in December 2012 after a decade-long hiatus, British Airways has maintained year-round London-Zagreb flights with some disruptions during the coronavirus pandemic. The Oneworld member had originally planned to operate four weekly flights between the two cities this coming winter, but that idea has since been binned.
Zagreb will maintain its extremely solid air connection with London, with Croatia Airlines operating three weekly flights to Heathrow and Ryanair operating an impressive ten cheap weekly flights to Stansted Airport. The Heathrow route has seen a decline in passenger numbers since Ryanair entered the London market in the summer of 2021 with four weekly flights priced extremely competitively. Demand for Heathrow has not recovered since the pandemic following the arrival of the low-cost carrier.
In the first quarter of 2025, British Airways and Croatia Airlines carried a combined 6,667 passengers, down 29.4 percent from the same period last year.
In comparison, Ryanair carried a huge 13,239 passengers on its popular Stansted route, up 19.9 percent from the first quarter of 2024. For the first time in many years, British Airways will not serve the former Yugoslav markets during the upcoming winter season, including but not limited to the stopping of the London-Zagreb flights. The withdrawal follows the cessation of flights from Heathrow to Belgrade last year, as well as the downgrading of the Ljubljana route to a summer-only service. The airline previously cancelled flights to Pristina in Kosovo back in 2022, and in 2023 it even downgraded its Dubrovnik route to solely a summer seasonal one.
Zagreb Airport otherwise received 437,568 passengers in May, an increase of 9.5 percent compared to the same month in 2024. The number of aircraft operations increased by two percent, to 4,600. During the first five months of this year, 1,714,209 passengers successfully passed through Zagreb Airport (149,428 passengers). That sum marked an improvement of 9.5 percent compared to the same period in 2024.
That growth will have continued throughout the month of June, and the current planned capacity has increased by 12 percent compared to last year. The strongest carrier in Zagreb by far is the much loved Ryanair, which had a capacity of more than 203,000 passengers in May alone. Zagreb Airport recorded mostly improved results during the first quarter of the year on flights to the Gulf, operated by Flydubai and Qatar Airways.
