The world's airlines have awarded Turismo de Canarias the award for the best destination in Europe in attracting air routes at the international connectivity meeting Routes Europe 2023 held in Poland. Turismo de Canarias competed with other public destination promotion entities such as Italy, Jordan or Malta.
The Archipelago has 731 air connections operated by 53 airlines from 147 airports, which places the Canary Islands as one of the best connected tourist destinations in the world.
The Turismo de Canarias delegation, headed by the managing director of the public company Promotur Turismo de Islas Canarias, José Juan Lorenzo, have attended this annual event where the main airlines in the world, airports and destinations present their flight schedule. These conferences allow the Canary Islands destination to reinforce its presence among the airlines to be taken into account for the sale of future air capacity.
An intense agenda of 25 meetings with airlines and airports is allowing us to verify 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 the next winter.
Specifically, the Turismo de Canarias team has observed that the Canary Islands are in a position to maintain high connectivity and even increase routes for next winter.
This winter there will be 2.1 million more seats than in 2019
In fact, to date the islands have an offer of 9,385,631 seats for their next high season, which runs from November 2023 to March 2024, which is 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%)
Especially noteworthy of this meeting for the islands is that "we continue working to expand connectivity with North America, an increasingly close objective," according to the managing director of Promotur.
It is also noteworthy that the prospects for this coming winter are improving with the connectivity of the Nordic countries, markets that have not yet recovered the activity they had before the pandemic.
The air operators thus convey to the Canarian delegation that, in general, demand continues to behave better than expected, with a strong and rapid recovery in Spain and especially in the Canary Islands, where some expected the aforementioned 'champagne effect', a rapid rise once the covid crisis was over and a stabilization or even a fall, given the high inflation and the geopolitical situation.
However, in the words of the companies, "the Canary Islands seem to have come out at another level, in a superior position. This translates into the maintenance of high connectivity and even, in the coming weeks we will see announcements of new routes with the Canary Islands for next winter," says Lorenzo.
