It has been a wild year for Croatia Airlines.
It was the year Croatia Airlines received 2 million passengers for the first time and the year that the airline decided to sell their weekly slots at London’s Heathrow Airport to Delta Airlines for a whopping 18 Million EUR last January. While the airline’s profits are up considerably this year because of the sale, there are some casualties.
ExYuAviation reports on December 15, 2017, that the Croatia Airlines flight from Rijeka to London will be one of them.
As a result of the airline’s sale of five-weekly slot pairs at Heathrow Airport, Croatia Airlines has been forced to suspend their one weekly service seasonal summer flights between Rijeka and London.
Croatia Airlines will, however, maintain their three-weekly flights from Zagreb Airport to Heathrow, one-weekly from Split, and two-weekly between Split and Gatwick Airport for the 2018 summer schedule.
It has also been reported that Croatia Airlines will close their office at Heathrow Airport by the end of January 2018 which secured five employees – three commercialists and two operators. In recent years, Croatia Airlines has closed all the foreign city outlets except in Zurich and moved its business to offices in airports.
The good news: A lot of airlines have confirmed flights to Rijeka next year.
The German airline Condor will offer a twice-weekly service from Rijeka to Frankfurt next May through October, while Ryanair has announced that they will introduce the same line twice a week, giving the airport a total of four weekly flights to Frankfurt next year.
French company Volotea has also announced the possibility of flights from France to Rijeka, while Adria has announced charter flights from three Scandinavian destinations (Gothenburg, Karlstad, and Norrkoping) in the pre-season of May and June next year.
Rijeka Airport is also said to be in negotiations with a European airline, believed to be Eurowings, to open a base at the airport from 2019.
