Canary Islands Tourism has been distinguished, and by vote among the airlines themselves, as the best destination in Europe in attracting air routes, an award given last Wednesday night at the international meeting of connectivity ‘Routes Europe 2023’ which is being held these days in Poland and for which it competed with public entities promoting destinations such as Italy, Jordan and Malta.
The archipelago has 731 air connections operated by 53 airlines from 147 airports, making it one of the best connected tourist destinations in the world.
The Canary Islands Tourism delegation attended this annual event where the world’s main airlines, airports and destinations present their flight schedules. These conferences help to reinforce the presence of the destination among the airlines in order to be taken into account with a view to the sale of future air capacity.
An intense agenda of 25 meetings with airlines and airports showed that the airlines are satisfied with the development of sales to the Canary Islands, not only for the current summer season, which is already underway, but also for next winter.
As of today, the Islands have an offer of 9,385,631 seats for the next high season – from November 2023 to March 2024 – 434,033 more than in the last winter season (+4.8%) and 2.1 million more seats compared to the pre-covid winter (+30.2%).
Particularly noteworthy at this meeting for the Islands is that work continues on the ever-closer objective of expanding connectivity with North America. Also noteworthy is the improved prospects for this coming winter in terms of connectivity with the Nordic countries, markets that to date have not recovered the activity they had before the pandemic.
The airline operators told the Canary Islands delegation that demand in general continues to perform better than expected, with a strong and rapid recovery in Spain and especially in the Canary Islands, where some expected the so-called “champagne effect”, a rapid rise once the covid crisis had been overcome and a stabilisation, or even a fall, in the face of high inflation and the geopolitical situation.
However, and according to the companies, it seems that the archipelago has come out in a better position, which translates into the maintenance of high connectivity and we will even see forthcoming announcements of new routes with the Canaries for next winter.
