RIGA - EU membership and the arrival of discount airlines have worked their magic on the Baltics' three main airports, with each capital's hub reporting stellar growth in passenger numbers and profitability.
The uncontested leader is Riga, where the international airport served almost 1.2 million passengers by the end of August, a staggering 84.5 percent increase over the same period last year. In August alone, 202,024 passengers made their way through the terminal.
Over the eight-month period the number of flights increased 62.4 percent to 22,763. Transport Minister Ainars Slesers, who is largely credited with cutting deals with Ryanair and Easyjet so that they would fly to Riga, has set a target of 2 million passengers for the year.
He is now busy with trying to work out a similar development plan for Riga Passenger Port, a ferry terminal, by attracting outside operators such as Tallink (see story this page).
In Tallinn, passenger growth was up 45 percent to 916,314 people, while August numbers were up 44.5 percent year-on-year.
The number of flight operations was 3,119 in August and 22,109 in the first eight months of the year, up respectively by 21.9 percent and 18.7 percent.
Vilnius International Airport recently announced that it was projecting some 20 million litas (5.8 million euros) in net earnings for 2005, a 20 percent increase year-on-year.
In the first seven months of 2005, the airport's revenues surged 38 percent to 56.4 million litas, while pretax earnings soared 62.9 percent to 14.1 million litas, Arunas Marcinkevicius, an airport spokesman, said.
But the heat will be on Vilnius' hub. Ryanair, the Irish budget carrier, is set to begin flights to Kaunas on Sept. 22. Response is expected to be big, particularly since Kaunas is only an hour's drive from the Lithuanian capital.
"We are very pleased with the development of the route. The Lithuanians seem eager to visit London, and the British seem curiously interested about Kaunas and Lithuania. For the first month of flying, we have already had more than 7,000 bookings on the route," Karl Hogstadius, Ryanair deputy manager for the Nordic and Baltic regions, said in a press release.
The route will have one daily departure from Kaunas and will be operated with brand new Boeing 737-800 aircraft.
In the future, Ryanair may offer flights from Kaunas to Frankfurt, Dublin and Glasgo.
On Dec. 1 Hungary's no-frill carrier, Wizz Air, will offer flights from Kaunas to Warsaw, as well as routes to Paris, Liverpool, Dortmund, Malme-Copenhagen, London and Stockholm, all via Warsaw.
Previously Kaunas Airport focused mainly on cargo. The airport, which operates a 3.25-kilometer long runway and may service any type of aircraft, posted a loss of about 1 million litas (290,000 euros) for 2004.
Meanwhile, Estonian Air reported it would not fly the Tallinn-Vilnius-Tallinn route from Oct. 1. Starting the same month, Latvia's airBaltic will make two flights daily between the capitals.
The Scandinavian airline group SAS owns 49 percent of the shares in Estonian Air and 47 percent in airBaltic.
