Air traffic has grown exponentially in Macedonia since the arrival of low-cost, or budget, airlines, which the government has stimulated via targeted subsisidies, Balkan Insight reports.
New data from the Macedonian Civil Aviation Agency (CAA) show that passenger numbers rose by 40 per cent in the last four years at Skopje’s Alexander the Great airport. Macedonia’s main airport last year nearly broke the million-passenger boundary, after more than 920,000 passengers passed through it.
The CAA data for the first five months of 2014 suggest that this ceiling is almost certain to be broken this year. The airport handled 18 per cent more passengers this year compared to the same period last year. Goods transport over the same period increased by over 22 per cent.
“Each year, we mark an average growth of some 10 per cent. This growth is very high if we compare it to the highest average growth in passengers in Europe, which is 5 per cent,” said Alp Er Tunga Ersoy, deputy general manager at TAV Macedonia, the Turkish company that operates Macedonia's two passenger airports in Skopje and in Ohrid.
In 2011, TAV opened a new passenger terminal building in Skopje as part of its EUR 110 million investment in Macedonian airports. Approximately ten times larger than Skopje’s previous city airport, it can manage at least 4 million passengers a year.
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