Flights to Croatia: LOT and Air Serbia Have No Rijeka Plans this Summer

Croatian Aviation reports that LOT and Air Serbia are not currently planning to return to Rijeka Airport in the upcoming summer flight schedule.

The Serbian national airline announced in a press release a few days ago that it would not resume traffic on four international routes in the 2021 summer flight schedule, including the line between Belgrade and Rijeka.

The Belgrade-Rijeka line was introduced in June 2019 and operated twice a week on ATR75 aircraft. The line continued to operate in most of the 2019/2020 winter flight schedule, but traffic was suspended before the global pandemic due to weak demand.

In the summer of 2020, Air Serbia did not resume traffic on several routes to Croatia (to Pula, Rijeka, and Zadar). The airline confirmed that it would permanently cancel the line between Belgrade and Rijeka in the restructuring process.

The Polish national airline, LOT Polish Airlines, introduced a route between Warsaw and Rijeka in July 2020. Originally, before the global pandemic, the airline planned to operate on this route from the very beginning to the end of the summer flight schedule last year. Still, for objective reasons, this was not possible.

LOT aircraft landed on Krk from the beginning of July to the middle of September 2020, and the airline currently does not plan to resume traffic on this line in the summer flight schedule this year.

Although introducing this line in the 2020 summer flight schedule was a bold move by the airline, it is not clear why LOT decided not to continue operating to Rijeka in the summer of 2021. Namely, whatever result the airline achieved on this route last summer cannot be relevant given that at the time of the global pandemic, the occupancy of aircraft on almost all routes was extremely low.

The loss is not great considering that LOT to Rijeka operated briefly and only once a week. Still, even such a minimum frequency enabled direct air connections between Kvarner and the Polish capital.

It should be noted that the German leisure airline, Condor, also confirmed that it does not currently plan to reintroduce the Frankfurt – Rijeka route in the summer of 2021 but is leaving the possibility of changes until mid-March when it concludes its schedule for this year’s summer flight schedule.

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