Korean Air, which will commence scheduled flights between Seoul and Zagreb on September 1, has unveiled further details for its upcoming new service. Speaking to EX-YU Aviation News, the company said it was seeking to boost cooperation with Croatia Airlines ahead of the route launch and ruled out operations to other points in the country for the time being. "Korean Air currently has an interline agreement with Croatia Airlines for connecting flights from Zagreb. We will continue our discussions with the Croatian carrier for further cooperation such as codeshares", the company said. Croatia Airlines currently codeshares on several flights with Korean Air's rival Asiana. "For now, Korean Air is entirely focusing on commencing scheduled flights to Zagreb in September. After the route stabilises, we may consider to fly to destinations in Croatia other than Zagreb", Korean Air said.
During the winter season, Korean Air will operate flights with the routing Seoul - Zagreb - Zurich - Seoul. The airline has confirmed it hasn't secured rights to sell tickets on the intra-European sector. "For the time being, it is impossible to purchase tickets from Zagreb to Zurich. However, we will consider ways to make it work in the future", the airline said. With the addition of the new route, Korean Air will operate international flights to 111 cities in 43 countries. Services to Zagreb will be maintained with the Airbus A330-200 aircraft over the summer, and the Boeing 787 Dreamliner during the winter season.
Korean Air has operated charter flights from Seoul to Zagreb since 2010, and the number of Korean visitors to Croatia have steadily risen each year. A Korean travel program featuring Croatia and first shown in 2013 is considered influential in first inspiring leisure travellers to the country. The Croatian Minister for Tourism, Gari Cappelli, recently said the country was looking to secure flights from four far away markets in the coming period. These include Japan, China, South Korea and the United States. "One of our main goals is to improve Croatia's air connectivity. The establishment of new flights is crucial to increasing the number of arrivals, especially from far away markets. We are particularly focusing on Japan, with which we recently signed a bilateral Air Service Agreement, but also China, South Korea and the United States, which all account for a growing number of tourists", Mr Cappelli said.
Comments
Great news for ou, personally flew with ou from split to zurich via zagreb with dash, always but always 100% LF, i don't understand why they don't put bigger plane, maybe because they have two daily or whatever...
swiss if not already, will be aware of that and will go during winter...
KE je napravio sa ovim odlican potez posto ovo ima verovatno veze sa Evropskim turama korejskih drzavljana koji dodju verovatno u FRA pa mogu da se vrate preko ZAG .
INN-NS
What will have more wide-body scheduled flights (departures) per week? BEG or ZAG?
Kako mozete da kazete da BEG gubi status huba cak ce u buducnosti jos napredovati u tom polju.
INN-NS
Bollocks !!!
The only hub close to Zagreb is Vienna, Munich is slightly further away, about the same distance Belgrade is from Zagreb.
A true hub must have 20 million + pax and daily connections with every continent, great offer of destinations and connectivity.
Only such hubs between Athens and Munich is Vienna. Munich, Amsterdam. Frankfurt, Paris, London, Madrid and Rome are true European hubs for they handle over 40 million pax and have all major intercontinental and regional airlines offering flights out of each of these hubs.
In ex-YU region, no hubs, only midsize airports offering flights, some with intercontinental service, in case of Belgrade flights to JFK and via Prague to China. In case of Zagreb, flights to Canada, South Korea, soon directly to China and Japan.
in terms of number of wide-body landings, Zagreb dominates, with number of weekly landings, by 4 carriers at this point, number that will grow.
Glad that we agree that it is very hard to call either Belgrade or Zagreb a hub :)
I never took Jin Air announcement seriously, with arrival of Korean to Zagreb, there's little chance of Jin air starting flights to Zagreb now, however I don't believe Jin Air was ever serious about their plans.
Jin Air has no new planes on order, not even wide-body, and four B777s are all utilized on asian routes.
As I've see it, Jin air statement was more of a PR stunt, than any serious policy decision.
Jin air consist of 21x Boeing 737-800 and 4 B777 200ER.
If Jin Air was really serious, they'd be ordering ore looking at leasing B777s really soon. They're not.
As I've said, Jin Air isn't serious outfit, it is a LCC start up, in a market dominated by number of carriers, Jin Air is just one of 6 LCCs in South Korea alone.
However, Korean Air, will fly to Zagreb and this is at least bit of good news to look forward to.
Last year, E-visitor electronic registration of all visitors to Croatia, put number of Australian visitors at 210 000 and Kiwi visitors at 35000.
This year so far, number of Aussie and Kiwi visitors is up by 27% for first 5 months.
E-visitor registers passport id number, every hotel and hostel has is connected to the system e-visitor and must report each visitor.
The passport ID number allows the central system to monitor and interprets overall data. This is how we know how many visitors visited Croatia and how many nights on an average they spent in Croatia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJgd_-m_HjI
Croatia is the first country to roll out such digital system, it is very accurate, well to a point, as airbnb and similar services do not need to comply, or they don't comply as many try to avoid paying city and vat tax.
However, evisitor is very good way of determining how many visitors arrived, where from, and where they stayed, which cities they visited and how long they stayed in each city.
In Croatia there are around 5500 Airbnb hosts, and about 3200 CS hosts, with occupancy rate of around 50% for Airbnb and 20% for CS.
Majority of these are in Zagreb, about 50%, so from this we can attain some idea how many visitors visit Zagreb and Croatia each year and aren't included in evisitor digital data system. For Zagreb, around 170 000 visitors aren't registered visitors each year. Croatia in total around 320-370 000 visitors per year.
When you consider Croatia has 18.5 million visitors in 2017, 370 000 isn't that much.
Although, 170 000 unregistered visitors that visited Zagreb last year do constitute significant %g, around 11.3%.
Before comparing to VIE, which is a true airport and airline hub (with 17m local and 6m transfer pax) BEG would need to more than double the traffic volume just to catch up with BUD and OTP and ZAG to triple, in an unlikely situation that both BUD and OTP stagnate or decline. And how real is that they will become transfer hubs, given the fact that both major operators at BEG and ZAG have less than 20 aircraft in their fleets?
I am looking at Air Baltic, which started about the same size as either carrier OU and Air Serbia in 2000, and now it is twice as large as two combined.
Air Baltic has every chance of becoming an major carrier with 10, perhaps even 20 million passengers down the line.
The bright hope for Croatian airlines is, arrival of Emirates, Qatar, Korean Air, future arrival of Hianan and ANA and potentially Air Canada also going year round.
If OU can cement codeshare agreements for local, domestic and regional routes of Zagreb, it'll be busy airline year round, not only in spring and summer months.
Each of these carriers is capable of braining in 30-40 000 travelers over winter period. 30 000 / 5 months = 6000 travelers that need connecting flights to the coast or somewhere else in Europe.
If only OU can get its act in order, numbers would quickly go up for all concerned, OU would double its fleet in less than a decade, and OU with 24-25 aircraft, 4-5 million passengers is more serious proposition.
All ex-Yu airlines suffer from a lack of vision which goes at best at replicating JAT in various degrees, which is nothing but suicide in current market conditions.
Air Serbia is the perfect example of that.
A sve i da mogu, zasto bi?