The Government of Cyprus will subsidise airlines over the next six months if they have load factors of 40-70%, to stabilise the sector in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
Transport minister Yiannis Karousos on June 10 said the Cypriot council of ministers had approved the incentive scheme to address the consequences of COVID-19 on the country’s air connectivity and aims at immediately re-establishing international passenger traffic.
The scheme will be in place over the next six months and have a budget of EUR6.3 million euros (USD7.15 million). It will be open to all airlines and will be based on aircraft occupancy and will only be granted if an airline can fill at least 40% of the aircraft’s capacity.
“For this reason, an incentive will be paid to the airline companies for a capacity of 41% to 70%, assuming that if the airline company exceeds 70% of aircraft capacity, it will have attained normal market conditions,” Karousos said.
“We anticipate that passenger traffic will reach 37,000 passengers in June, 196,000 in July, 460,000 in August, 634,000 in September, 693,000 in October, 388,000 in November, and 334,000 passengers in December,” he added. “Already, 20 airline companies have said that they plan to operate flights to Cyprus. We estimate that in the coming days this number will increase to 40 airline companies with a further increase as of the middle of July.”
Cyprus reopened Larnaca and Paphos on June 9 after nearly three months of lockdown, with the first flights arriving that same day. Since then, Blue Air (Romania) (BLA, Bucharest Henri Coanda) has announced it will resume base operations in Larnaca from June 21 while Wizz Air (W6, Budapest) will base two A320-200s in Larnaca from July onwards.
