Air Serbia » Er Srbija | 15 - I joined Air Serbia in June 2019, with the aim of stimulating the growth of the company and transforming the commercial strategy it had previously pursued. We managed to achieve that relatively quickly, thanks primarily to the very high-quality team that I inherited. People only required a little new energy and encouragement to succeed in achieving the planned results. Testifying to this is the fact that we ended that year with a record 2.81 million passengers, which continued during the first months of 2020, when we recorded double-digit growth. Then came the pandemic, but you managed to remain optimistic… - Yes, everything had seemingly ground to a halt, but I retained my optimism. Despite our aircraft being grounded for commercial passenger flights during the first three months of the pandemic, Air Serbia quickly found its own role and purpose. We made all our resources available to the state, in the public interest, so we could help the Government of Serbia in the struggle against the pandemic. We thus organised a large number of repatriation and evacuation flights, bringing more than 10,000 of our citizens back to Serbia, but also returning foreign citizens to their home countries. Alongside this, we transported essential medical equipment, and later also vaccines, and thereby also contributed in this way to the struggle against Covid-19. How realistic is it that you will achieve the airline’s 2019 operational levels by 2023? - I would express that slightly differently. We don’t want to return to pre-pandemic levels; we want to overtake them, and to do so in 2023 by the latest. We’ve already achieved that in some segments. For example, we will have approximately 30 per cent more charter flights this year than we had in 2019. What’s more, we already surpassed the 2019 levels in the charter flight sector during the last summer season. This is all evidence that people want to travel and that there’s strong demand for tourist destinations, and that motivated us to introduce more than ten new destinations this summer. This is first and foremost about flights to popular tourist markets, such as Spain and Italy, and results have exceeded our expectations for those destinations. Do you have any figures on the extent to which the aviation industry is being hit by ecological demands; how much it has to reduce CO2 emissions and what else needs to be done? - In terms of environmental protection, the aviation industry has already done a lot, but that is not mentioned much, or sufficiently promoted. The amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the aviation industry is incomparably less than other means of transportation, as well as certain other human activities. Numerous industry initiatives and activities are focused on the environment and sustainability, such as the IATA’s Fly Net Zero initiative to achieve net zero carbon among airlines by 2050. Air Serbia is part of all those efforts. Our Iako se većina avio-kompanija trenutnomuči sa nedostatkom ljudstva, Er Srbija ima resurse da se prilagodi svimpromenama Even though most airlines are currently plagued by staff shortages, Air Serbia has the human resources to adapt to any changes fleet renewal programme is also being implemented in this context, within the scope of which we’ve grounded our former Boeing fleet, which comprised older aircraft, and are now replacing our older ATR aircraft with newer ones. After a break of 32 years, the route to Chicago is again being launched. What are your further plans? - Our transoceanic projects were planned and started long before the pandemic. Since the launch of flights to New York in 2016, after six years of traffic and around 400,000 transported passengers, that route has matured and become profitable. That’s why we decided not only to increase the frequency of flights to New York during the winter season, thereby reducing the route’s pronounced seasonality, but also to enter into the further expansion of our long-haul traffic. We decided to launch a balanced approach both eastwards and westwards. However, the possibilities for eastward expansion currently remain limited due to the pandemic? - Yes, in that context, one route will be established to China- to Tianjin, along with the possibility to later establish special flights to Beijing and Shanghai, once market restrictions are lifted. When it comes to westward expansion, as of April next year we will further strengthen our traffic to the U.S. with the establishing of direct flights to Chicago. Alongside this, we will work to further deepen and strengthen our regional network, in order for us to ensure good connectivity with our transoceanic traffic. Likewise, we will continue expanding our network of destinations predominantly to tourist destinations, which this year proved to be a bull’s eye shot. Can we expect some exotic destination? - We’re currently planning to add ten new destinations in 2023. At the same time, we’ve also started considering long-haul flights to certain exotic destinations. We’re looking both eastwards and westwards in this regard.
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