KOLTSOVO airportEkaterinburg Airport Handles 12.7% More Passengers in 2012
22 January 2013 @ 10:37Ekaterinburg Koltsovo International Airport, a member of the Airports of the Regions Group, handled 3 783 069 passengers in 2012. It is 12.7 percent more than in 2011. The largest growth (+23.4%) was seen in international traffic with
Some new carriers entered the Ekaterinburg market in 2012, such as Astra Airlines and Aegean Airlines from Greece, both operating the Ekaterinburg–Thessaloniki route, and Armavia, Armenia’s national airline (Ekaterinburg–Yerevan). All in all, 46 airlines serviced Ekaterinburg Airport, a 9.5% increase against 2011.
The new destinations of the year were Aqaba, Thiruvananthapuram, Lankaran, Harbin, Grozny, Budapest, Kulob, Venice, Sovetsky, Ulan-Ude, and Cherepovets. The total number of destinations services was 114. The most popular tourism destinations of the year were countries of Asia and Africa, such as Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Thailand, and Egypt. Besides, tour operators and airlines were offering an extensive charter program from Koltsovo to, among others, such new exotic destinations as Aqaba in Jordan and Thiruvananthapuram in India.
Moscow remains the most popular destination within Russia, with about a third of Koltsovo’s passengers heading for a Moscow airport. Also, the airport continued implementation of its regional route network development program, with comfortable Embraer120 thirty-seaters flying regional lines of up to 1000 km (to Kazan, Ufa, Samara, Perm, Magnitogorsk, and Orenburg). That project accounted in 2012 for more than 60 thousand passengers.
