In the first three months of 2025, Tivat Airport will be at the top among the airports in the area of the former Yugoslavia in terms of the extent of reduction in the available capacities of airlines that will operate with that airport from January 1 to April 1.
Namely, in that period next year, Tivat airport will have a total of 16.748 available seats in airplanes on regular routes compared to the first quarter of this year. This is the result, first of all, of the decision of the Turkish national airline Turkish Airlines to temporarily cancel its flights on the Istanbul-Tivat-Istanbul route this winter, on which Turkish Airlines operated year-round.
Just because of the cancellation of flights, Tivat will lose a total of 19.336 available seats in airplanes in the first three months of next year. Although other carriers such as Air Serbia announced that part of their flights from Belgrade to Tivat this winter will be operated with larger capacity aircraft, i.e. with E-195 embraers instead of the usual ATR-72 for that period of the year, this additional increase in their available number of airline seats was not nowhere near enough to make up for the loss of Turkish flights.
In the winter IATA season 2023-2024, Turkish Airlines had five weekly flights on the Istanbul-Tivat route. It will return to this line in April next year with, as announced, ten weekly rotations, which is a quarter more than this year. It is interesting that, although Turkish Airlines is withdrawing from the Tivat-Istanbul route this winter, the Montenegrin national airline "Air Montenegro" due to the small capacity of its fleet, will not simultaneously increase the number of its rotations on that route, where until now it was the only competitor to Turkish.
The Turkish company withdrew from the year-round route to Tivat after "Air Montenegro" insisted to our authorities on the strict application of the provisions of the bilateral agreement between the two countries on air traffic, according to which national carriers from one or the other country can have a maximum of 21 rotations per week between Montenegrin and airports in Turkey. Therefore, the Turkish carrier decided to concentrate its permitted flights this winter on Podgorica.
In terms of the number of lost available airline seats on regular routes, in the first quarter of next year in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, the only airport "Konstantin Veliki" in Niš will be worse than Tivat airport, which can count on 22.120 fewer available airline seats than in the same period last year.
Unlike Tivat, in the first quarter of 2025, Podgorica airport will have 25.544 more available airline seats in aircraft on regular routes than was the case in the first three months of last year.
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