Croatia Airlines was struggling with its repeated attempts to find a strategic partner and was publishing losses long before the coronavirus pandemic swept the globe, and the appearance of the new virus was the absolute last thing that the Croatian national airline needed…
As Poslovni Dnevnik/Darko Bicak writes on the 3rd of August, 2020, in addition to tourism and the role in which aircraft play in that, the coronavirus pandemic has hit air traffic as a sector on its own the hardest, with operations falling by more than 90 percent in recent months.
Even without the global coronavirus pandemic, airlines across the world have been undergoing a significant transformation over recent years, primarily due to the increasingly aggressive and increasing penetration of low-budget players, and now due to large losses, there is no national operator that isn’t being held up to some degree or another by its home country. Croatia Airlnes (CA) is no exception. The company, which was touched on previously, has been undergoing a kind of business transformation and has been engaged in the search for a strategic partner for many years now.
The coronavirus pandemic stopped all of that indefinitely, and the company reported 173.2 million in losses in the first half of the year on Friday, up significantly from 89.4 million in losses in the same period last year. Croatia Airlines pointed out that they transported 330,935 passengers in the first half of the year, which is a concerning 66 percent less than they did during the first half of last year. The number of passengers in domestic regular traffic decreased by 63 percent, to 83,618, and when it comes to international flights, the decrease stood at 66 percent, down to 244,382 passengers.
Croatia Airlines aircraft has so far performed 5,661 flights during 2020, which is 57 percent less than 2019. The structure of the company’s routes was adjusted to the needs of the air traffic and the Q400 fleet was used more, whose capacity is smaller than that of the larger Airbus. Croatia Airlines is currently flying from Zagreb to fourteen European destinations, with London’s Heathrow remaining strong.
There are announcements for August that a total of 37 destinations could be opened, which will hopefully provide a much needed boost for Croatia Airlines.
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