The Boryspil international airport’s General Director Oleksii Kochanov has said that the political events in Ukraine have had insignificant impact on passenger traffic, the CFTS correspondent reports.
“We compare indicators not only with the difficult year 2013, but also with the rather calm 2012. Compared with 2012, we had a 5% increase in passenger traffic in January. I cannot say that the political events are not affecting the occupancy rates of airline companies. They have a negative effect, but we feel that the fluctuations are within 5% and February confirmed these figures," he told reporters on Wednesday.
According to Kochanov, the airport’s base carrier, Ukraine International Airlines, pays a lot of attention to development of transit traffic, which is less susceptible to the influence of the events in Ukraine. In addition, there is a certain degree of outflow of business passengers.
"Regarding tourism, the changes have hardly affected this segment because there were few tourists in the winter, anyway," said the head of the airport.
He added that passenger traffic through the airport is forecast to increase by 15% to 9.2 million in 2014 based on a pessimistic scenario and by about 26% to 10 million people based on an optimistic scenario.
According to Kochanov, a 45% increase in the intensity of flights within Ukraine is expected in April (including over 100% increase in flights to/from Lvov, an 88% increase in flights to/from Odessa, and a 71% increase in flights to/from Simferopol) based on the slots requested for summer 2014.
