Serbian national airline Air Serbia officially got new routes for 2023 under way in mid-March with the Belgrade to Budapest route going active March 13—but of note is that this was just the first of some 20 new routes to begin flights for the summer season.
“With [the March 13] flight to Budapest, we launched the first out of more than 20 destinations we will be operating flights to during the upcoming summer season, which were not a part of our network in 2022,” Bosko Rupic, general manager for Commercial and Strategy at Air Serbia, said, as cited by airserviceone.com.
“We will monitor demand, and in accordance with it, gradually increase the frequency of flights between the two cities,” he added. “We believe that the introduction of direct flights will contribute to better connectivity between Serbia and Hungary and make travelling all over Europe much faster for our passengers.”
This return to a Budapest route takes place after a four-year hiatus, but following the hard years of the COVID-19 epidemic the airline has aggressively booked new routes to Europe, Asia and the US.
The airline has also capitalized on this expansion with plans for the addition of a new, wide-body Airbus A330-200 aircraft to be added to the company’s fleet this summer by June or July, as reported in February by www.exyuaviation.com.
At the time, Air Serbia CEO Jiri Marek stated that the company had “short-listed [A330] aircraft so we are doing final approval processes, and we believe, depending on the MRO [maintenance, repair, overhaul] slot and facility, that it might be in operation in June or July.”
The CEO at the time also said plans for new routes to Beijing and Shanghai were in the works, as well as to US destinations, and since then the airline has indeed announced more than 20 planned routes.
Photo by Alan Wilson, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.
