Air Serbia will launch four new scheduled seasonal destinations in Greece during the summer of 2023, as it aims to introduce a total of 21 new routes in 2023. The Serbian carrier will add flights from Belgrade to Heraklion three times per week, increasing to four in June, Chania three times per week, Rhodes four times per week, and Corfu twice per week.
All will be operated by the Airbus A320 aircraft. The airline will compete directly against Wizz Air on the Heraklion service but faces no direct competition on the rest.
It previously flew to all four destinations on a charter basis. The announcement is in line with its strategy to offer leisure holiday hotspots as scheduled routes.
The latest development brings Air Serbia's number of destinations in Greece to six, complementing Athens and Thessaloniki.
Air Serbia plans to introduce a total of 21 new routes in 2023 with sixteen of them now made public.
The carrier is expected to announce the remaining destinations in the coming days. Following talks with Air Serbia’s management, the Serbian Minister for Construction, Transport and Infrastructure, Goran Vesić said, “We are proud of our national carrier, which plans to add 21 new scheduled destinations to its network in 2023 alone, and has a business plan for a record year”.
In addition to the abovementioned, the Serbian carrier has so far announced the introduction of flights from its hub in Belgrade to Budapest, Ankara, Catania, Izmir, Hamburg, Chicago, Gothenburg, Cologne, Naples, Florence, Marseille and Palermo.
Air Serbia’s Head of Network Planning, Bojan Arandjelović, announced last week, following the reveal of another three new routes, “We believe that 2023 will be the year in which we will push our limits further, offering nonstop flights to almost 100 cities around the world". The carrier is also growing frequencies on existing routes across its network next summer season.
The development follows the introduction of a total of 21 routes in 2022, with the last three to be added in December, as the airline commences operations from Belgrade to Tianjin and Malaga, as well as from Niš to Zurich.
The remaining destinations to be announced by the airline for the summer of 2023 are expected to be in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.
The carrier has plans to restore operations to Tel Aviv, while earlier this year, the Serbian President, following talks with his Egyptian counterpart, said Air Serbia plans to return to Cairo in the spring of 2023.
In Europe, Portorož Airport recently said it was in the final stages of talks with the Serbian carrier over potential flights, while the Agency for the Promotion and Support of Tourism in Macedonia held talks with the airline over the introduction of a two weekly summer service to Ohrid starting in June.
Out of Belgrade Airport’s top ten busiest unserved routes in Europe based on indirect traffic, Air Serbia has now covered almost all of them with its 2022 and 2023 expansions, with exception to Lisbon, Manchester, Krakow, and Yerevan.
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