The airlines between Belgrade and Podgorica, or Tivat, are the busiest within the region of the former Yugoslavia and last year reached a new record in terms of the number of passengers carried.
The ExYu Aviation portal announced this yesterday, specifying that the total air traffic between and within the countries of the former Yugoslavia region during 2024 reached its highest level since the collapse of the former common state.
With a total traffic of 642.927 passengers, the routes between Serbia and Montenegro are in the lead. The busiest ex-YU airline route last year was Belgrade - Podgorica, with a performance of 326.265 passengers, which is 4,2 percent more than the year before, or five percent more than in the previous record year of 2019.
A total of 316.662 passengers were transported on the Belgrade - Tivat line last year, which is 1,4 percent more than in 2023, but 32 percent more than in 2019.
Only the national airlines of the two countries operate on routes between Serbia and Montenegro - Air Serbia and Air Montenegro, which, thanks to their duopoly and the simultaneous great interest of passengers, are able to maintain unusually high ticket prices on them.
The third busiest route in the former Yugoslavia is between Zagreb and Dubrovnik in Croatia, but its performance lags far behind Belgrade's air connections with two airports in Montenegro. Between Zagreb and Dubrovnik, Croatia's national airline Croatia Airlines carried 216.579 passengers last year, which is 6,6 percent more than the year before, but despite this, it still did not reach the results from the period before the Covid pandemic, as its performance last year was 11,9 percent weaker than in 2019.
The same is the case with last year's fourth busiest line in the region, Zagreb - Split, which, with 159.963 passengers transported, had a growth of 5,3 percent compared to 2023, but still remained 12,5 percent below the results from 2019.
Interestingly, however, the flights between Zagreb and Dubrovnik, or Split, although the busiest in Croatia and one of the best in the former Yugoslavia, are on the list of so-called PSO routes in Croatia (Public Service Obligation), which the airline chosen to operate them is co-financed by the local government. This is how the government in Zagreb has managed to “pump” taxpayers’ money into the Croatian national airline, Croatia Airlines, for years without “angrying” the competent European Union institutions that monitor illegal state aid.
It is also interesting that the Podgorica - Zagreb route, which was flown seasonally by the Irish low-cost carrier Ryanair last year through its Austrian subsidiary Lauda Air, with a total traffic of 30.813 passengers, was one of the busiest routes outside the “top ten” of the most popular air connections in the former SFRY. According to last year's performance, the seasonal route Zagreb - Podgorica was better than the year-round flights between Zagreb and Pula (25.247 passengers), Zagreb and Zadar (22.597), the seasonal route Belgrade - Split (23.501), or the year-round route Podgorica - Ljubljana, which carried a total of 21.791 passengers last year. However, a completely solid result and even a fairly high average passenger cabin occupancy of 86,5 percent did not motivate Ryanair to continue this route, which was first reduced from year-round to seasonal, and was completely discontinued after the end of the summer IATA season in November last year.
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