Belle Air starts regular Tirana-Perugia Flights

TIRANA , Dec.8 – Low-cost Albanian carrier Belle Air announced on Friday last week that it will launch a weekly flight between Tirana and the Italian city of Perugia on December 16. The regular Saturday flight will connect the Albanian capital to the central Italian city located in Umbria region. Belle Air destinations total eight and include other Italian cities, as well as the Greek capital Athens and Turkey’s Istanbul. Belle Air, is a private Albanian company set up last year. Currently it operates as the sole Albanian low-cost air carrier and was the second low-cost airline to start operations in Albania. Its main competitors are the Italian air carriers AlpiEagles, Clubair and the newly operating Myair, which flies to Bari, Italy. A fourth low-cost carrier, the German Germanwings, performed summer flights to Tirana this year but has currently discontinued operations.
The Mother Teresa Airport, Albania’s only passenger airport, handled 691,504 passengers in the first nine months of 2006, compared to 612,148 passengers in the same period last year. Italy’s Alitalia was market leader in the nine-month period with a 20% market share. The airport is located 25 kilometers northwest of Tirana and it is managed by the German-U.S. consortium Tirana Airport Partners (TAP). The consortium was granted a 20-year build-own-operate-transfer concession on the airport under which it would invest 83 million euro ($105.4 million) in its capacity increase. Out of it, over 50 million euro will be invested by the end of next year. The latest information from the airport shows that fourteen air carriers now have flights to and from Tirana on 25 international destinations, compared to 15 air carriers and 28 destinations in the summer. The latest arrival is the Italian low-cost air carrier Myair started flying to Tirana in mid-November.