Platov international airport (part of the Airports of Regions holding) has reviewed its performance in 2019. The traffic at Platov reached 3m60thou people including 2m378thou passengers taking domestic flights.
“The commissioning of Platov airport lifted all infrastructural limitations for the development of air travels in South Russia; as a result, we saw an explosive growth of air services in 2018. The FIFA World Cup was also responsible for additional traffic that year, roughly estimated at 150 thou passengers. Now the market has ‘calmed down’ and got back to normal,” says Executive Director of Platov Airport Alexander Serov. “What is important, never before, prior to the launching of Platov, the traffic at the Rostov-on-Don airport had exceeded 3 million people, but now this symbolic threshold has been exceeded for the second year in a row.”
Further extension of the regional route network is among the key results of the year: in this area Platov airport collaborates with the backbone carrier Azimuth Airlines and Rostov Region’s government. For the airlines opening flights on new routes there is a programme of service discounts – an effective tool leveraging the development of air travels in the region.
The development of direct interregional flights resulted in a 10-percent growth of traffic on the routes bypassing Moscow. In 2019 it became possible to fly from Rostov-on-Don to Vladikavkaz, Kaliningrad (with an intermediate stop in Kaluga), Perm (en-route stopover in Nizhny Novgorod), Omsk and a number of other Russian cities. The frequency of flights to Makhachkala, Mineralnye Vody, Grozny, Ufa and Chelyabinsk has increased.
Overall, flights on 46 regular routes were operated from Platov. In 2019 international air travels kept developing due to new flights bound for Larnaka, Rimini, Sanya, Krabi, Sharjah. The number of flights to popular destinations such as Antalya and Istanbul, which are the leaders of demand, has also increased. Flights to CIS capitals – Yerevan, Bishkek, Tashkent, and especially to Minsk – are on the rise. The number of passengers who received services on the flights to the capital of Belarus has surged by more than 1.5 times as residents of South Russia have duly appreciated Minsk both as a city appealing to tourists and as a convenient hub for connection flights heading for Europe.
In 2019 flights from Platov were operated by more than 100 different airlines including carriers specializing in charter flights and business jets. The airliners of 18 national and 7 foreign airlines performed regular flights from Platov airport.